What killed McChrystal’s career wasn’t actually Rolling Stone’s newsprint and ink. It was the general’s mouth – and his lack of understanding of media.

Like many a source, McChrystal grew a bit too comfortable with reporters around him (see New York Times’ Gail Collins funny column) and began to believe that they wouldn’t report his every word. As discussed on NPR’s “On The Media” this week, beat reporters typically don’t write everything they see and hear.

As a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, I developed sources by looking the other way at times. I once wrote about a law enforcement unit conducting a planned drug raid after riding along with the officers. Before the raid, the officers, all plainclothes, met at a bar with me in tow. And they had a drink or two. While on duty. Just a few hours later, they raided a drug house, and ended up drawing weapons to save the life of an undercover officer inside.

Did I write the drinking part of the story? No. Did that help me win their trust in the future? Yes. That said, if the bust had gone bad, maybe I would have written about the drinking. Or if one of them had been in a DWI accident. Was it smart for them to take me to the bar and watch them drink on duty before an armed raid?

I recall being with an elected official I worked for who surprised me by telling a trusted reporter we ran into something, off-the-record, that was very juicy. Off-the-record. Well, not long after, another reporter, a friend of the first reporter, called me, saying she had heard from “a source” that this elected official had said such and such. Guess what? This second reporter wrote the story. It was a huge story. And the elected official had a big headache of a problem that lasted for months.

What McChrystal and others sometimes forget is that reporters have a job to do. Put something juicy in front of them, their job will be to try to get it into the media. Maybe not every time. But you never know.

Another interesting aspect of the Rolling Stone story is that the magazine initially gave excerpts of its story exclusively to AP and didn’t post the story online until the next day. This drove interest in their print edition. As columnist David Carr wrote today, it also drove Time magazine and the website Politico to run PDFs of the print story on their websites – until Rolling Stone demanded their removal.

So, reporting isn’t dead, and neither is print – not within the last few days, anyway.

As the story unfolds, the media will naturally scrutinize statements made by officials at the outset. Officials did the right thing by extending sympathies and promising to get to the bottom of what caused the facade to fail.

But it was interesting to observe an on-camera statement by County Executive Scott Walker on WTMJ-TV last night in which he said that no official reports allegedly existed of any maintenance backlog that would relate to the accident. A couple of minutes later in the same WTMJ piece, reporter Aaron Diamant contradicted Walker’s statement. Diamant said that county officials knew for six months about $600,000 in “critical” deferred maintenance at the garage, and that the garage was in “really bad shape.”

Which statement was right — the county exec’s or the reporter’s?

The media and especially WTMJ-TV are certain to analyze that initial statement by the county executive. If he was wrong, that’ll be an ongoing part of the story. It’s a reminder that when talking to the media, especially during a crisis, that statements need to be extremely carefully considered and 100% accurate.

An obvious PR strategy would be to focus on fixing the leak, or at least do everything it can to stop the flow, and publicize that. And take your lumps. The lumps in this case are unavoidable and deserved.

But BP is employing a different strategy — put a cap on critics and media. And they think this will work?

Media outlets have been complaining about being denied access to the spill. The result: More bad press and a congressman complaining: http://snipurl.com/x9xms. Good move?

Not content to just go after the media, BP is targeting satirists. Specifically, BP is tangling with a Twitter writer who created a comic Twitter account – @BPGlobalPR. (It’s worth reading — well done.) According to this New York Times story I read over coffee this morning — http://snipurl.com/x9xw9 — the phony BP Twitter account had nearly 145,000 followers. As I write this post at 8:30 a.m. cst, it’s topped 150,000 and will continue to grow thanks to BP’s attack on it. The story in the New York Times reached millions and will be picked up by other media outlets, drawing more and more people to the Twitter feed. Was it worth trying to extinguish a humorist — and making him an even bigger read? You be the judge.

Although the website is new, Bentoff Communications (and parent company Bentoff LLC) has been active since February 2003. I founded this company after two decades of firsthand experience in the fields of public affairs and media relations. (To learn more about my background, as well as the strengths of Bentoff Communications, visit the About page.)

Moving forward, I’ll use this blog to share strategies, tips and other industry advice about public affairs and media relations, In the meantime, if you have questions or are facing your own communication challenges, send me a message. And thanks for visiting Bentoff.com.