Political journalist and war correspondent Michael Hastings has died in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 33.
Hastings, a contributor to Rolling Stone and Buzzfeed, was remembered by his colleagues as “fearless” and a “great reporter.”
The young journalist was most widely known for his award-winning 2010 Rolling Stone article that exposed General Stanley McChrystal’s lax management of his staffers and led to the general’s firing.
A frequent guest to a number of msnbc shows, host Rachel Maddow paid tribute to Hastings on her show Tuesday night.
“Michael was angry,” Maddow remembers of him after the publishing of his first book, I Lost My Love In Baghdad, the tale of the loss of his fiancee to an Iraqi ambush. “He was also loving, and thoughtful, and constructive, and brilliant, but he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with things that weren’t right in the world, and with war, and with loss, and that drove his reporting and it made him fearless when he realized he had found something important that he could report.”
Hastings left behind his wife, Elise Jordan, Rolling Stone reported.
Ali Vitali is MS NOW's senior congressional correspondent and the host of "Way Too Early." She is the author of "Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet."