Did Twitter Cost McChrystal His Command?

General Stanley McChrystal possessed two masters degrees, attended three different military schools, earned 13 prestigious badges and served in three wars overseas yet he faced his greatest enemy of all was that of Twitter4 . What started off as nonchalant remarks that carelessly rolled off the tongue of McChrystal with a Rolling Stones reporter in earshot, quickly ignited a firestorm of seismic proportions on Twitter. “It was the article from Michael Hastings that broke the story, but it was Twitter who got the story rolling”.

Michael Hastings was a reporter for the Rolling Stones Magazine who spent two years in Afghanistan with General McChrystal2. It was Hastings article, “The Runaway General”, that first exposed the way in which McChrystal’s team disparaged Obama administration officials. While Hastings article first appeared in newsstands on Thursday, June 24, a Rolling Stones spokesman leaked the story to the Associated Press on Monday, June 21 which resulted in a conflagration of tweets from various people including Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. By the time the Monday night news aired, McChrystal was the top story, all the while, the Rolling Stones article was days away from the shelves.

After news of the story leaked, America continued to follow the progression of this situation on Twitter. Samantha Guthrie, an NBC news correspondent updated her Twitter followers by announcing that McChrsytal was summoned to a meeting at the White House on Monday night3. The rest of the story soon came out and McChrystal was soon trending high on Twitter’s trending list listed in the 10th position, behind the World Cup and Wimbledon1. At Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, McChrsytal was fired and replaced less than 24 hours after the first tweet, much faster than the three weeks President Truman took to replace General MacArthur over the latter’s criticism of the Korean War effort.

This article shows that the role and importance of social media has extended beyond a social perspective and has dramatically impacted business, institutions, and governments. In fact, Andrea Mitchell from NBC has over 9695 Twitter followers, while Sarah Palin has over 1,680,644 followers on Facebook. While it clearly was the content of the article that Hastings published that caused the controversy, it was Twitter that rapidly accelerated the dissemination of information so the public and news media could obtain updates by the minute regarding the latest happenings. Before McChrystal even had a chance to apologize, the spread of information via Twitter already convicted him of wrongdoing in the court of public opinion.

The original intended impact of social media such as Twitter and Facebook was to connect with friends, family, and colleagues. It actual impact today stands to do to cable-news networks what cable news did to broadcast. Timpane said in his article that “We've gone from the one-day news cycle to every hour on the hour to second by second1."

Sources
1Timpane, John. “New Media too Speedy to Outflank” Philly.com. Web. 24 June 2010.
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20100624_New_media_too_speedy_to_outflank.html


2 Hastings, Michael. “The Runaway General” Rolling Stone 1108/1109
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=0

3 Shachtman, Noah. “Did Twitter cost McChrystal his Command” CNN Wired. Web. 28 June 2010
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/28/twitter.mcchrystal.wired/index.html?iref=allsearch

4 Council on Foreign Relations. “Biography of General Stanley McChrystal. Published in 2010.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/19396/biography_of_general_stanley_mcchrystal.html