Lara Logan may not be a household name in the world of journalism, but she has been a part of some well-known international news stories over the past decade.
Logan, who is from South Africa, began her news career there in Durban in 1990 and has worked for Reuters, ABC, NBC, and CBS as a freelance reporter internationally. In 2002 Logan was offered a correspondent position with CBS News where she spent most of her time on battlefields reporting in war zones around the world. Logan also made regular appearances on CBS 60 Minutes.
But Logan is perhaps best known for what happened to her off camera than on. In 2011 she was in Egypt covering the Egyptian revolution when she and her camera crew were arrested and detained by Egyptian police. They were later released but as they moved back into the streets a large group of Egyptian males encountered them and began to make lurid comments about Logan. Soon the crowd became aggressive and Logan was taken by the mob and sexually assaulted. She would later say she believed she was going to be killed. She spent several days in a US hospital upon her arrival from Egypt.
With nearly 30 years of journalistic experience at major news networks around the world, Logan is a prime candidate to speak on the subject of bias in the news industry. She sat down with retired Navy Seal Mike Ritland and was interviewed for Mike’s podcast “Mike Drop.” Logan had interviewed Ritland 6 years earlier for a segment on 60 Minutes. Now Logan was on the side being questioned.
Ritland has been a harsh critic of the American news media, calling it “absurdly left-leaning” and that “Democrat biases were a huge —-ing problem” and a disaster for the country. “I agree with that. That’s true,” Logan replied. She also implied it wasn’t just an American problem. “The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.,” she said. In the U.S., Logan says there are only a small number of news organizations that don’t march to the Leftist drumbeat. She cited Fox News and Breitbart as two examples.
In the podcast with Ritland, Logan talks about her experience in newsrooms.
“Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them. And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me.”
“My experience has been that the more opinions you have, the more ways that you look at everything in life — everything in life is complicated, everything is gray, right? Nothing is black and white.”
“This is the problem that I have. There’s one Fox, and there’s many, many, many more organizations on the left. … The problem is the weight of all these organizations on one side of the political spectrum. When you turn on your computer, or you walk past the TV, or you see a newspaper headline in the grocery store If they’re all saying the same thing, the weight of that convinces you that it’s true. You don’t question it, because everyone is saying it. Unless you seek out Breitbart on your computer, you’re probably not even going to know what the other side is saying.”
She wonders how people can know what’s accurate and what’s not when so many news outlets are saying the exact same thing, in many cases word for word.
“How do you know you’re being lied to? How do you know you’re being manipulated? How do you know there’s something not right with the coverage?” she asked.
“When they simplify it all, there’s no gray. It’s all one way. Well, life isn’t like that. If it doesn’t match real life, it’s probably not. Something’s wrong. For example, all the coverage on Trump all the time is negative. … That’s a distortion of the way things go in real life.”
Logan continued, “Although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today. We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that.”
Another major problem she sees is the use of anonymous sources, particularly in the government. “That’s not journalism, it’s horse shit,” she said. “Responsibility for fake news begins with us.”
At the end of the three hour and forty-nine minute interview, Logan said something that in itself is very revealing of the state of our free press in America. She said, “This interview is professional suicide for me.” A sad, but likely all too true, sentiment in the era of Trump and the news media.
Here is the full video of the interview from the Mike Drop podcast.
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