Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings
Michael Mahon Hastingswas an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancee Andrea Parhamovich was killed when her car was ambushed in Iraq, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story, a memoir about his relationship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth28 January 1980
CountryUnited States of America
For me, when I go in to write a profile, and no ground rules are laid down, and I'm there to write an on-the-record profile and cover readings while in the room, then that means it's on the record.
Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.
He's been wanting to do this forever, ... Mike began writing in sixth grade.
If Bill O'Reilly is calling you a far-left critic, in my book, no matter what your political persuasion is, that's probably - that probably means you're doing a good job.
Usually when reporting on powerful public figures, the press advisor and I would have had a conversation that established what journalists call 'ground rules,' placing restrictions on what can and cannot be reported.
I was a researcher on Friday and Saturday nights, ... but I spent a lot more time there. We were having a heat wave and the office was air-conditioned. They mistook me for a hard worker.
To General McChrystal, those men on his team are his family. You know, these guys, they would do anything. They would die for each other.
I'm talking to people all of the time. So it hasn't really had a big impact. Access is never my main concern anyway. If you keep digging and making phone calls you can get stories and not have to rely on the good graces of the Pentagon spokesperson. I am not in his good graces.
A new software is being developed so the psychological operations guys and the Pentagon's strategic communications guys - and we don't really know who's running it - but this is all totally out in the open. It's this new program that will allow them to have like ten fake Twitter accounts and ten Facebook accounts so you can pretend.
Look at the violence in Pakistan and the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan: the more troops we put in the more violent Pakistan becomes.
Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.
Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.
Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work."
The humanitarian argument is so selective I find it difficult to swallow. It's not even so much about the choice as to where we should get involved and where we shouldn't.