Journalist Michael Hastings dead at 33

Hastings (Yahoo News/File)

Michael Hastings, the journalist whose explosive 2010 Rolling Stone profile of U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal ("The Runaway General") led to McChrystal's ouster, died in an early morning car accident in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the magazine said. He was 33.

"Hard-charging, unabashedly opinionated, Hastings was original and at times abrasive," Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, said in an obituary. "He had little patience for flacks and spinmeisters and will be remembered for his enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism."

Hastings, who covered the 2008 presidential election for Newsweek, was hired by Buzzfeed last spring to cover President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.

"We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone," Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in a statement. "Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague and a joy to work with and a lover of corgis?especially his Bobby Sneakers."

Hastings is survived by his wife, Elise Jordan, a journalist and former speechwriter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity," Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said in a statement. "The sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there's no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won't be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours. He will be missed."

Hastings' "hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power," the magazine said, pointing to an email exchange he had last fall with Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks:

Hastings' aggressive line of questioning angered Reines. "Why do you bother to ask questions you've already decided you know the answers to?" Reines asked. "Why don't you give answers that aren't bullshit for a change?" Hastings replied.

Hastings was the author of two books: "The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan" based, in part, on his coverage of McChrystal; and "I Lost My Love In Baghdad," detailing two tumultuous years covering the war in Iraq for Newsweek. (Hastings' then-girlfriend, Andi Parhamovich, was killed in a botched kidnapping after joining him in Baghdad.)

He also authored a recent e-book, "Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/michael-hastings-dead-33-002300721.html

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