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(CNN) -- David Petraeus had another love affair long before the one that cost him his job running the CIA. It was with the press.
In the wake of the scandal members of the media are questioning whether Petraeus' almost saintly image accurately reflected his achievements, or was the product of a clever PR strategy created by the Pentagon and Petraeus himself. "More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image," says Michael Hastings at BuzzFeed.
"How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long?" asks Hastings. "Well, his first affair — and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two — was with the media."
The questions tend to go something like this: Were we too easy on him? Why did the press – usually so hard-bitten and cynical – come under Petraeus's sway (= power to rule or influence people)?
Spencer Ackerman, reporter at Wired, is trying to find an answer in the article titled "How I Was Drawn Into The Cult Of David Petraeus." (cult of personality = a situation in which people are encouraged to admire and praise a famous person, especially a political leader - used to show disapproval)
“I wasn’t alone in this. Petraeus recognized that the spirited journalists like me (spirited= having energy and determination) could be a powerful weapon in his arsenal. “He promptly answered journalist e-mails and had an impressive command of journalistic lingo (=words or expressions). His ability to talk to a reporter for 45 minutes on the record and off-the-record, to say meaningful things and not get outside the lane too much — it was the best I’ve ever seen,” recalls the retired army colonel Pete Mansoor.
It paid dividends. Newsweek put the relatively unknown general on its cover in 2004 under the headline CAN THIS MAN SAVE IRAQ? (It’s the first of three cover stories the magazine wrote about him.) Thanks to the press Petraeus earned such epithets as an “intellectual,” unlike those “old-fashioned, full of violence commander[s],” as TIME’s Joe Klein wrote in 2007. This media admired Gen.Petraeus despite the bloody street fights that characterized Baghdad during the military actions”.
Petraeus was indisputably a genius at developing a friendly relationship with the press. He courted the press in part by granting reporters access -- though none quite as extraordinary as that he was granting his biographer, Paula Broadwell. He understood how access could help soften the media's rough edges. The general routinely invited reporters for morning jogs, giving them a sense of being part of the action. “It’s embarrassing to remember that that felt pretty good,” Ackerman recalls.
Vernon Loeb, the Washington Post reporter, also partook in runs with the general. “The commander of the war in Afghanistan and I ran side by side, talking about great world events,” Mr. Loeb recalls in a post-scandal piece. “I could scarcely believe I was getting this kind of access to his command headquarters,” he writes, adding that he “found the general impressive and inspiring.”
Though Petraeus provided tremendous access, few real revelations tended to come of it. Ackerman recalls an interview he conducted on a morning run with the general as “he calmly avoided answering my tricky questions.” It was only afterward that he realized “I didn’t gain any useful or insightful answers, just a crazy workout story that I strained to transform into a metaphor for the war.”
In other words, the stories tended largely to reinforce Petraeus’s point of view. Even when reporters disagreed with Petraeus, they still used his language. For example, Petraeus would often say progress on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan was “fragile and reversible.” When reporters quoted him on this line, however, they were still using the word “progress.”
One thing is clear: Petraeus benefited a lot from a friendly press. "He trusted journalists, took them into his confidence, and in return was portrayed as a brave general, military intellectual, and, eventually, potential presidential candidate," says Howard Kurtz at CNN. "That's not something you should fault Petraeus for," he continues. "It's something you should fault reporters like me for. The stories produced by this relationship served to build up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Another irony that Petraeus' downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuatingmyths without fully realizing it."
Indeed, the retired general's skillful courtship of journalists brought him a career's worth of favorable headlines and has, to a remarkable degree, softened the coverage of his fall from grace. The media response to Petraeus' stunning downfall has been largely elegiac in tone, rather than bitter and cruel, a reflection of the respect he enjoyed in the press not long ago. (elegiac = showing that you feel sad about someone who has died or something that no longer exists)
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