michael hastings
Michael Hastings was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. Over a five year span, he regularly covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He started his career at Newsweek magazine in 2002, and was named the magazine’s Baghdad correspondent in 2005. In 2008, he reported on the U.S. presidential elections for Newsweek. His work has appeared in GQ, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and a number of other publications. In 2011, he was awarded the George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his story in Rolling Stone, “The Runaway General.” In 2010, he was named one of Huffington Post’s Game Changers of the year. In 2009, his story Obama’s War, published in GQ, was selected for the Best American Political Writing 2009 anthology (Public Affairs, 2009). He is the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story(Scribner, 2008) and The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan(Little Brown, 2011).
“The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.”
“Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn't see journalism as "morally indefensible" was either "too stupid" or "too full of himself," she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door on the possibility that I was both stupid and full of myself, I'd never bought into the seduction and betrayal conceit. At most, journalism - particularly when writing about media-hungry public figures - was like the seduction of a prostitute. The relationship was transactional. They weren't talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone.”