Journalist Michael Hastings dies in car crash at 33, BUT was it an "accident"

Hastings in Vermont (Penguin/Rolling Stone)

Michael Hastings, the award-winning journalist whose explosive 2010 Rolling Stone profile of U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal ("The Runaway General") led to McChrystal's resignation, died Tuesday in an early morning car accident in Los Angeles, the magazine said. He was 33.

"Hard-charging, unabashedly opinionated, Hastings was original and at times abrasive," Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, said in an obituary. "He had little patience for flacks and spinmeisters and will be remembered for his enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism."

Hastings, who covered the 2008 presidential election for Newsweek, was hired by Buzzfeed last spring to cover President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.

"We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone," Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in a statement. "Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague and a joy to work with and a lover of corgis—especially his Bobby Sneakers."