Award winning Investigative Journalist Michael Hastings was killed in a violent and fiery car accident in Hancock Park in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Photo from BuzzFeed
By Brian Hews
Michael Hastings, one of the most respected young investigative journalists in America was killed in a violent and fiery car accident on Tuesday morning in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles.
Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal, US Army (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Hastings won a 2010 George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his Rolling Stone cover story “The Runaway General” and he was credited with literally ending Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s career with the Obama Administration. He quoted McChrystal and his aides by “mocking” Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, over their war policies.
The word of Hastings death sent a literal shock wave throughout news outlets across the country just hours after his passing became public.
In a statement on BuzzFeed on Tuesday evening, Staff Reporter Ben Smith said that Hastings “was really only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write.”
“While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave. And he was warm and honest in a way that left him many unlikely friends among people you’d expect to hate him,” Smith stated.
“Michael, who died at the age of 33 in a high-speed wreck in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning, wasn’t like any reporter I’ve ever worked with. He found conflict constantly, but never by accident. We fought, first, over the adjectives in his stories — “discredited” was a favorite — and then over his theories, which were typically the opposite of whatever I was hearing from my Washington sources. In the meantime I marveled at his talent and at the thing I hadn’t particularly expected: his generosity,” Smith continued.
Members of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office have not issued an official statement or confirmation of Hasting’s death as of late Tuesday night.
