Hope, Fear, and Michael Hastings
21st June 2013
The Other McCain is on the case.
Hastings had a thorough contempt for journalistic customs, including objectivity, which he dismissed as a “fallacy.” As I wrote of him in a profile, Hastings was “a liberal who shared the anti-war, anti-Republican sentiments widespread in his generation of journalists.” Hastings was at least honest about his bias, as opposed to the allegedly objective reporters who cover politics. Most of the young journalists who followed Mitt Romney around on the campaign trail last year may as well have been paid members of Obama’s campaign staff, given their intense commitment to helping defeat the Republican. Journalists have always been predominantly liberal, but recent years have seen an influx of young writers like Hastings who came of age in the anti-war campus cauldrons of the Bush era, and to them the GOP is an enemy more dangerous than any foreign dictator or Islamic terrorist.
Having crusaded to spare the nation of another Republican presidency, young liberal writers like Michael Hastings seemed genuinely shocked by recent revelations of the Nixonian nature of the regime they did so much to help re-elect. Last year, Hastings praised Obama with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old girl describing a Justin Bieber concert, but two weeks ago he seemed disillusioned. “Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters … have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ,” Hastings wrote, denouncing “Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties.”