by George Rasley
It’s not often when a respected member of the establishment media agrees with the statements, the American news media’s leftwing and partisan Democrat biases as a “huge f*cking problem” and “disaster for this country.”
But Lara Logan, the respected foreign correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes, did just that in an interview published last Friday with the Mike Drop podcast, hosted by retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland.
As Breitbart’s Robert Kraychik reported, Ritland characterized U.S. news media as “absurdly left-leaning” and supportive of Democrats, further describing the status quo of American news media’s leftwing and partisan Democrat biases as a “huge f*cking problem” and “disaster for this country.”
Kraychik reports Logan concurred, “I agree with that. That’s true.” She described U.S. and international news media as “mostly liberal,” adding, “most” journalists are left.
“The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.,” assessed Logan.
Logan elaborated:
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.
Ms. Logan then warned:
One ideological perspective on everything never leads to an open free diverse tolerant society. The more opinions and views … of everything that you have, the better off we all are. So, creating one ideological position on everything throughout your universities, throughout academia, in school and college, in media, and everywhere else, that’s what concerns me. I don’t have to agree with everybody.
Kraychik reports Logan added, “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.”
Breitbart News and Fox, said Ms. Logan, are among a handful of useful barometers of “the other side” of news media:
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.
Most news media outlets ignore the origins of ostensibly grassroots political activism, Logan told Ritland. She pondered the geneses of such campaigns, speculating on technology firms’ roles in amplifying such campaigns:
We don’t even question if what we see on social media is real or not. We don’t even question if a grassroots movement is really grassroots. You know, there’s a way to start a grassroots movement. You write an algorithm, and you create all this outrage, and you’re basically throwing out all the sparks that light the fire, so then it becomes a grassroots movement because it takes nothing to set that in motion. But did it really begin as one? And if it didn’t begin that way, but was manipulated and paid for by someone and serves someone’s political purpose, is it really what we believe it is?
…People were manipulated into doing that. … Who’s behind it? Who’s doing it, and why are they doing it? And what else are they doing? Those things are profoundly significant, and we’re not even trying to find out who it is. That really bothers me.
Ms. Logan had a lot more to say in the interview with Mike Ritland and we encourage CHQ readers and friends to watch the entire podcast or at least read Robert Kraychik’s lengthy report on Breitbart.
We thought Ms. Logan’s interview with Mike Ritland was one of the more interesting examples of establishment self-analysis we’ve seen in a long time, but what was even more interesting was the reaction on the Left.
Lefty websites, such as DemocraticUnderground.org were quick to crank-up the outrage and trash Ms. Logan, especially for mentioning Breitbart as a credible source for “the other side.”
Anyone who believes that Breitbart is a legitimate news organization… can’t be taken seriously, said prolific poster “twilightzone.”
She is so full of BS. The media follows the bidding of its corporate masters… and that aint liberal! Posted “ananda.”
And “radius777” said, “Logan sounds like she’s auditioning for Faux News – better bleach that hair a little blonder.”
Thinking along those same lines, African-American author Adrianne Byrd @adriannebyrd went full racist on Logan tweeting, “6 years after her b.s. Benghazi report when she was suspended from 60 minutes, Lara Logan returns proving how one demographic continues to fail upward.”
Likewise, Michael Calderone @mlcalderone, Senior media reporter for Politico, Ferris Professor at Princeton, Fall 2018 and Adjunct professor at the NYU School of Journalism (a trifecta in Logan’s list of Leftwing bias) was quick to deflect from her point, tweeting:
Lara Logan calls the media “mostly liberal,” suggests reading Breitbart, and accuses Media Matters of targeting her over Benghazi. Reminder: Logan’s Benghazi report was discredited for journalistic reasons, not political ones
Ms. Logan had a lot to say in her interview with Mike Ritland, but from our perspective, her most important may have been this:
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? When they simplify it all [and] there’s no grey. 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.
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George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie’s ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns. A member of American MENSA, he earned his first newspaper byline in 1976 for an article in The Goshen (Indiana) News. His family began in the newspaper business in 1831.
Photo “Lara Logan” by Mike Ritland.
