NYT Slams Politico And Time For Scooping Rolling Stone On Its McChrystal Story

President Obama may have solved his McChrystal problem but the long tail of the now-infamous Rolling Stone profile is still kicking around the media world. In his column today at the New York Times, David Carr takes Politico and Time to the woodshed for posting a full PDF of the McChrystal story before Rolling Stone made it available on their site.

Some background: The Rolling Stone article began making the rounds on Monday afternoon after RS sent out an advance copy to the AP “with restrictions” (it was about this time the administration first learned of the piece, also). By the time the nation awoke Tuesday morning the story, and the news Obama had called McChrystal back from Washington, were leading most news reports. A short time thereafter both Politico and Time posted a full PDF of the story because it was not available elsewhere to the public (before it went up I pulled excerpts from Marc Ambinder‘s blog). RollingStone.com didn’t post the story until 11am. Says Carr: “It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket.”

Really? What if the competitor is not savvy enough to understand how to make money? Carr goes on:

Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).

“That’s like saying, ‘She had it coming,’ ” Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, said in an interview on Thursday. “The decision about when to publish our material is ours and ours alone. It was completely inappropriate.”

First, it is not like saying she had it coming. At all. Secondly, it’s great that Rolling Stone had intended to “publish on its own schedule”, however, to the best of my knowledge the breaking news cycle rarely allows anyone to do to anything on their own schedule. And this was big, breaking news. That Rolling Stone was caught off guard by the impact of their own article is one thing — many people were. That by the middle of the night on Tuesday someone at Rolling Stone didn’t realize their story would be leading the national news cycle and make decisions — decisions based on how the news works in 2010 — accordingly, strikes as astoundingly short-sighted.

This was not an interesting profile with catchy anecdotes that some other news organizations stole for a quick traffic grab (nor can I imagine anyone doing that). This was a story whose impact was of immediate, international importance; in essence the story was the story. Under any other circumstance I think Carr would be right on the money in scourging either Politico or Time for their actions, however, if anything this instance (this very rare instance…when was the last time a magazine story had this kind of immediate impact?) is, if anything, the exception that proves the rule.

It may not be nice that the story got posted in full elsewhere, it may not be fair, but I also think that to presume you own the “right to publish on a schedule you chose” when what you are publishing is determining the course of action is a highly controversial war, is downright naive.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.