Michael Hastings first gained national prominence as a reporter in 2010. He had pitched Rolling Stone on a story about the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan as “the forgotten war” that would focus on the four-star general leading U.S. and NATO operations: General Stanley McChrystal. The magazine’s editors were skeptical, but Hastings impressed them with his instincts for maneuvering past barriers, and by April, Hastings was with General McChrystal and his entourage in Paris as they were drinking heavily at Kitty O’Shea’s Irish Pub. He captured a McChrystal adviser referring to Joe Biden as “Bite Me” and McChrystal expressing disdain for diplomats like Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry. The story, titled “The Runaway General,” used McChrystal’s teams’ trash talk to argue that the military leadership was running a rogue operation whose counterinsurgency strategy had turned the Afghan War into a quagmire.
A day after the article was published online, McChrystal had been summoned to the White House and tendered his resignation to President Obama. Right away, Hastings faced pushback from other journalists, who seemed skeptical that a young reporter really could have elicited scenes of such candor from American military leaders. Some say he over exaggerated the seniority of the military aides he spoke to. Others alleged that he broke agreed upon ground rules and used material that was off the record. Senior members of McChrystal’s staff wrote in the Army Times that Hastings had used off the record material, and took advantage of a boozy night of drinking with very junior members of McChrystal’s staff. Hastings denied this.
Though we might not know what exactly happened in the lead up to the Rolling Stone article, we do know that he used questionable practices in other cases. In 2007, he published a book I Lost My Love in Baghdad after his fiancé was killed in Iraq where he was reporting. Hastings casts himself as a central figure in the book, and released details about his fiancé unknown to her family, as well as the contents of private text messages. In 2012, he took a job at BuzzFeed to report on the Obama administration and repeatedly reported comments from off-the-record drinks sessions. He would also insert himself into the stories he was reporting on, in the style of Hunter S. Thompson, who he had been enamored with in college.
But while he bent some of the norms of journalism, others admired his commitment to the truth and to holding the powerful accountable. A fellow reporter said of Hastings: “The truth is he was parachuting in to do something all of us wish we can do and can’t. When someone comes in and says he’s not going to play by the rules, it touches a nerve, but also there’s respect.”
–DISCUSSION QUESTIONS–
Is there value to Hastings’s brand of journalism? Why do other journalists object? Why do journalistic norms prohibit this kind of behavior?
Isn’t truth the most important goal in journalism? Shouldn’t we appreciate the reporting Hastings has uniquely been able to provide regardless of the means?