Michael Hastings, 'Rolling Stone' Contributor, Dead at 33 | Hacker News Reader

Michael Hastings, 'Rolling Stone' Contributor, Dead at 33

rollingstone.com

99 pointsmkr-hn66 comments

Hastings did an IAMA on Reddit a year ago:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/uaha0/iam_michael_...

Here's some tips he gave about pursuing journalism as a career:

Okay, here's my advice to you (and young journalists in general): 1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it's medical school or law school. 2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word "prose," or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer. 3.) Be prepared to do a lot of things for free. This sucks, and it's unfair, and it gives rich kids an edge. But it's also the reality. 4.) When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence. 5.)Also, keep the stories simple and to the point, at least at first. 6.) You should have a blog and be following journalists you like on Twitter. 7.) If there's a publication you want to work for or write for, cold call the editors and/or email them. This can work. 8) By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained. (In other words, if you can't come up with a rough headline for your story idea, it's going to be a challenge to get it published.) 9) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it's more important to you than anything else in your life--family, friends, social life, whatever. 10) Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading.

Michael Hastings wrote notable and impactful Rolling Stone pieces such as "The Rise of the Killer Drones."

It is with some irony that Rolling Stone publishes more serious journalism than half of the headline grabbing mass news web publishers I see on HN daily.

Too bad.

Rolling Stone has always been a political magazine. Often with a certain je-ne-sais-quois (see Hunter S Thompson), but political never the less.

In the 90s they shifted to a more media-based based magazine, compared to previously and they have endeavoured to move back to being a political magazine.

Also, two of David Foster Wallace's best non-fiction pieces were for Rolling Stone. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Non-fictio...

>A contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Hastings leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting, including an exposé of America's drone war, an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at his hideout in the English countryside, an investigation into the Army's illicit use of "psychological operations" to influence sitting Senators (...)

People have been killed or "vanished" for less. Just saying.

This is a little over the top. His car jackknifed into a tree. In order for your theory to make sense, his assassins would have had to ensure his car 1) hit a solid object, 2) caught fire.

nonetheless, these things are not unknown to have happened nefariously

If that's true, you should be able to provide an example.

I don't believe this was nefarious and I do respect you tptacek, but cutting the break line is not an unknown way to attempt to off someone. It was even in the wheelhouse of these gomers http://5newsonline.com/2013/03/06/moms-brake-line-cut-over-c...

Any cases where anyone murdered a reporter by sabotaging their car, or where the US government murdered a reporter by any means at all would be fine.

http://collateralmurder.com/

David Holden was believed to have been killed by the CIA (either on order via Egyptians or directly). Multiple car bombs have killed journalists in Iraq, but I seem to remember a case in the US (will look later) of the brake line cut variety.

Google much?

http://www.ire.org/about/history/

While, as others pointed out, the well-known Collateral Murder video is in part about the US Government murdering a team of journalists, I don't see anything on that page or on the timeline it links to saying the US Government was involved in murdering Don Bolles.

You know it's a bad week on HN when tptacek (or anyone) is downvoted for asking for an example of a far-fetched claim.

It was a really dumb question for me to have asked; it's like I dared them.

An open-ended question like that about people's foolish ways to try to off their fellows in a single profession[1] is going to generate a lot of examples. Car bombs seem to be an easy way with some folks[2]. Heck, fark.com has many on a weekly basis. Reading the Church Committee stuff gives a pretty good idea of how wild west our government got (and likely still is given the drones).

For the record, I still think this incident was a simple accident.

1) en.rsf.org keeps track of attacks on the press

2) Nasrullah Afridi died on May 10 when a bomb exploded under his car after he entered it.

Yes, it was really a dumb question. And the condescending tone, of the American that believes everything he is told even more so.

Hindsight's a bitch too:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/24/journalist-m...

The US has killed a lot of journalists internationally. Generally more in the form of "collateral damage" (often acknowledged), but I'm pretty willing to believe either US personnel or those acting as its agents did murder people in various Central/South American and African conflicts in the 40s-80s (and mainly pre-Church).

Well, define "US government". Does every single US politician have to be in the same room and give the order, or what?

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/07/iraq-j01.html

The killing of journalists seeking to document or expose allegations of state-organised murder has accompanied every dirty war against a civilian population. Since the US occupation of Iraq began, dozens of reporters, cameramen and other media workers have been killed by American-led forces in suspicious circumstances that were never independently investigated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16501566

I find it really amazing that you are not well versed in some of the tactics employed in international espionage and "source neutralization"....

As someone who is purportedly a security expert, I believe it would behoove you to square up on physical/psychological/political warfare -- as cyberwar is simply an additional channel for the stated three.

TpTacek, you're brilliant,but sometimes you're also an...

I am beginning to think your paycheck is subsidized by those who would want you to use your credibility in their favor but at detriment to your own...

With modern cars, you don't need to cut brake lines. You just connect something to the OBD-2 port and control it as you like: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229919/Car_hacking_R...

I don' necessarily believe this is nefarious. I just believe we should remember that it's possible. Proof is hard when it's the CIA. They're professionals at covering things up. I'm far from an Alex Jones on such things, but I like to be highly sceptical of everything, and keep an open mind.

Here is a historical maybe: I don't have time to trawl through for good ones, as there are a lot of more, er.. unusual sites out there who'll believe anything. However, there are some aspersions cast over the deaths of some former white house aides too.

http://spartacus-educational.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/did-cia-...

Journalists have been killed by governments (and police) all over the world, including in Western countries. And lots have been murdered by unknown persons while investigating political corruption and similar matters. Those kind of things can vary from a targeted operation to a general "go get those troublemakers by any means necessary" attitude instilled to the police.

Stuff like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A9n_Salazar

Or several of the cases in here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_t...

Of course they don't go advertising those kind of things. What sometimes gets known is only due to gross cases of incompetence or pure chance.

To a guy that's into the official versions of things it can sound ludicrous. But then again, worse things happened. He would have said the exact same thing for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment

> If that's true, you should be able to provide an example.

Are you saying you're not aware of any retribution killings for journalism? I'm all for skepticism, but I've always understood that to mean it's your own problem to dig into this stuff. Asking for citation on a common knowledge item does no one any favors most especially yourself.

http://cpj.org/reports/2005/05/murderous-05.php

I'm not listing this as an actual example, it's just for fun in the name of conspiracy theories in regards to powerful political figures murdering people:

The Clinton body count (and I'll admit, it's a freaky list, but probably only because so many people have crossed paths with the Clintons)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/bodycount.asp

Whether nefarious or not, I do think the editor at Rolling Stone intended this quote, possibly quite literally:

says Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, "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,

I hope if he were working on new stories, that he at least left some notes behind. Also, the global surveillance grid is a double-edged sword. I'd love to see some GPS data and final tracking of this journalist before he died.

Anyhow, I don't choose to live my life thinking all these events and accidents are anything other than they seem. But I do hope we still have great journalists in our world who will expose reality to us when events are not as we thought. I'd love to read an alternate take on this journalist's accident, but until that story is published, I'm not turning into a conspiracy theorist. Amazingly, in recent weeks, I have felt very much like one, but it's just because I read the news and many nutcase theories have been proven to be very much true and widely acknowledged by the public (versus 5 years ago when talking about the government reading your email made you a tinfoil hat lunatic amongst non-programmers).

Well, assuming the theoretical assassins had physical access to his car and world-class embedded systems expertise at their disposal, it would just be a matter of locking his doors, disabling steering, disabling braking, and flooring the car's engine output. Unless the car is in the middle of nowhere, it's bound to hit something sufficiently lethal in a very short amount of time.

That said, although peculiar given his line of work, I think it is premature for conspiracy theories at this point considering the near complete lack of information on the accident itself currently.

Without taking sides, are there not ways to make acceleration just kick in and continue, and brakes to disable?

Further conjecture: I am not familiar with the architecture of modern vehicles, but I know (hackable) software has been increasingly at the center of these. Failing that, there's always (easier to detect) hardware tampering. Fortunately, if things burn you destroy the evidence, and with the frequency of automobile accidents there is little motivation for an average investigation to turn micro-forensic... particularly with a young person in a risky age group in a foreign country.

Of course, maybe he just did a fat fifty lines of coke, or a hit of meth? Or, just maybe, he was challenged to a one-man street race after a dose of Scopolamine: http://watchdocumentary.org/watch/worlds-scariest-drug-video...

Non-conjecture: There's loads of ways to off people, and the military industrial complex makes it a business. This guy forced a general from that complex to end his career, later visited his country and wound up dead early in the morning.

If a car did that, you could just put it in neutral.

Most people aren't going to think of that in time. I've had my accelerator stick under the carpet before. There was a good few seconds of panic there that would have been deadly had I not been on a straight highway.

If you're unwilling to break, eventually you'll hit something solid.

In high school, a friend of mine decided to kill himself. He wanted a painless, certain, instant death, so he drove down the freeway at 80mph, aimed his car at a giant (utterly immovable) concrete overpass piling and prepared to die. As soon as his car left the regular roadbed, it went out of control, sideswiped the bridge piling, flipped several times and came to rest upside down. Despite having gone through such violent acrobatics with no seatbelt or airbag, when his car came to a rest, he crawled out the window, dusted himself off, and cursed. A few scratches and small bruises.

He didn't try it again because, he later explained, he had discovered that an out-of-control car was just a random number generator, and he was terrified of a "partial" success that would leave him still alive but permanently incapacitated and forever dependent on others without the capacity to really live or really die.

I suspect that the powerful conspirators some people seem to suspect are well aware of my friend's lesson and are equally unwilling to tolerate a partial success. I don't believe they would risk so much on an out-of-control car and a simple tree.

>I suspect that the powerful conspirators some people seem to suspect are well aware of my friend's lesson and are equally unwilling to tolerate a partial success.

It depends on what constitutes success.

Take this hypothetical: the target has a habit of driving lightly to moderately intoxicated. Assuming he or she survives, do you think anyone is going to believe this person's story about what actually happened when the toxicology report comes back saying they were intoxicated? No.

The said conspirators would still reap partial success in the form of a clear message and chilling effect, not to mention inflicting potentially debilitating injuries or the resulting damage to the target's reputation.

Hypotheticals aside, you're probably right. If an unlikely cabal of evil conspirators are going to go to such lengths, they likely would prefer a more predictable outcome.

While I don't have a link to the studies at hand, I've seen it shown that being any amount of intoxicated generally makes people relaxed enough that they are able to handle better some of the forces of some types of automobile collisions.

Or you know, that he was dead inside the car to begin with.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Of course, there's a remote chance it's just an accident.

Only a remote chance?

How often have people on HN mentioned that you're more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack again?

Well, I say "remote chance" because when you get involved knee deep into confronting people with Power, there's no limit as to what they can do to make it up to you. Just like some people "commit suicide" with the help of a third person.

Really, a remote chance? An accidental car crash, which happens all the time, seems far less likely to you than a government conspiracy to murder a well-known journalist? Seriously, any time a story involves the US Government, half of HN drops Occam's Razor and picks up Paranoia's Rusty Dull Pocketknife. Why don't you wait for a bit of evidence before making uninformed speculative comments like this one?

I love the analogy, although perhaps Paranoia's Dead Mackerel.

No doubt political cynicism (mine included) makes it easy to consider Hastings might have been killed.

Reminds me a little bit of the theory that Breitbart was given an induced heart attack, the night before he was to announce supposed evidence against Obama being an American citizen (and then one of his coroners, Michael Cormier, was poisoned with arsenic right before Breitbart's cause of death was to be released, and died on the day it was released).

In 1975 the CIA's heart attack dart gun (plenty of info available online for it) was declassified at a hearing. It was able to induce a heart attack with a frozen poison that would melt upon impact, and leave no obvious detectable trace for medical examiners afterward. (the hearing was "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" aka the Church Committee)

Ok. Someone please debunk the last point about the coroner. If that's really true there should be legitimate attention brought to this.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/30/no-answers-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

I saw that movie too!

I wonder if these conspiracy thoughts would be so prominent if not for the recent NSA news? It seems once trust is lost, everything is questioned.

Exactly. It's clearly a case of: if they'll do X, will they do Y?

The US Government does have a rather sordid history though, it's not like they're saints. From the fake Iraq weapons claims, to the Gulf of Tonkin incident being used to get us into Vietnam. If they'll go to such lengths to get us into wars that kill massive numbers of people (our own included), I do find it hard to believe they won't kill a single journalist (without implying that's what happened to Hastings).

"The second Tonkin Gulf incident was originally claimed by the U.S. National Security Agency to have occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead may have involved "Tonkin Ghosts"[6] (false radar images) and not actual NVN torpedo boat attacks.

"The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by 'communist aggression'."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

Or this (US military admitting to having sprayed black communities in St Louis with radioactive chemicals in the 1950s and 1960s):

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/suit-fil...

"Why don't you give answers that aren't bullshit for a change?" Hastings replied.

This man was a badass.

I'm glad to read that someone took the opportunity to say to their face, what I think daily when I can even talk myself into watching / listening to such apparatchiks, any more.

Love her or hate her, Rachael Maddow said of Hastings tonight (paraphrased from memory) "There are a lot of journalists who hope to be or claim to be fearless in their reporting. Michael Hastings was fearless. Most people got the impression after talking to him briefly that he wasn't like everyone else -- you were NOT going to be able to ignore him."

He was an infrequent guest on Up with Chris Hayes. I remember fast forwarding through most guests verbal essays to listen to his.

He'll be sorely missed... in an era when we need people like him the most.

38 comments, and no one mentions his problems with addiction: http://trueslant.com/michaelhastings/2009/04/28/a-case-of-th...

4:30am on a residential street - the CIA/NSA couldn't kill me that way if they tried.

(The video is horrendous - bad way to die.)

This is eerily spooky. I saw this accident this morning on my way to work. They completely blocked off Melrose and Highland with about a 2 block radius. I had no idea this accident was tied to him till I arrived home.

I was able to drive around and get a scope of the accident scene and felt something wasn't right.

The center divider has about a 3/4 miles worth of trees. I want to know where he 'lost' control. Street has multiple stops along the way...

I hate car crashes. It's such a waste of life. We have the technology to prevent these, it's just a matter of investing in getting them into every car on the road.

I presume you're talking about self-driving tech?

Any details on the car crash?

I don't know about anyone else, but I feel something isn't quite right. "Fearless Journalist Car Crash Into Tree And Dies In Explosion.". http://ktla.com/2013/06/18/driver-killed-in-fiery-car-crash-... Mythbusters have shown this doesn't usually happen. http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/crash-a...

EDIT: I made up the headline.

"Explosion" is likely a dramatization of "caught fire and burned rapidly".

Wow. Yeah, that's ... unusual.

Just google "fiery car crash" and you'll see it is unfortunately fairly common.

The intersection where the car crashed. A median with trees and light posts begins here heading southbound, as well as some trees on the sidewalk west of the street. I don't know which tree was collided with.

https://maps.google.com/?ll=34.083531,-118.338458&spn=0.0013...

Either the reporter was driving drunk (at 4:15am on a Tuesday morning aka Monday night) or this is some kind of conspiracy (body burned beyond recognition).

I'm still not sure how a car "jacknifes", unless that's referring to the opposite ends of the car wrapping around a tree. Normally, that phrase refers to a tractor-trailer combination turning sideways around the towing joint.

I saw this on my way to work this morning. I live close, actually. I went around to survey the accident since it's looked pretty odd. Those tree's span for quite a while, and it took him all that time to "jacknife" into one?

To answer your question: He hit the 3 or 4 tree in.

A close friend of mine died in much the same way. It happens.

Video from local news crew: http://ktla.com/2013/06/18/driver-killed-in-fiery-car-crash-...

It's a shame to lose such a bold journalist when they are in short supply. There is an irony that the Rolling Stone is the place to house free speech.

"Traffic collision"

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