Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Who Is Lara Logan?


You know about Lara Logan. You have read, as we all have, her interview with Mike Ritland. Since Logan is no longer the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, she can now speak her mind. Call it liberation, but Logan has used her freedom to denounce the mainstream media for overt and frank political bias. In that she follows the lead of Jill Abramson who said as much about the New York Times.

Logan declared that journalists are not really journalists any more. They are political activists and lobbyists for liberal interests. This means that their sense of what is factual and objective has disappeared. In a journalist is ethically obliged to report the news, without fear or favor, without mixing it with opinion, today’s journalists are morally deficient. It’s not about opinion journalists… who are in the business of offering opinion. It’s about the journalists who pretend to be reporting the facts but are really promoting an ideology.

As it happens, Logan is no longer with CBS. We do not know why she was dismissed or whether she simply resigned. At the least, we know that she, a victim of gang rape, was treated shabbily by her former employer.

So says Breitbart, (via Maggie's Farm) and the point is worth emphasis. You recall that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was idolized for offering up unsubstantiated allegations that she was groped by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh. And of course Anita Hill became celebrate as a heroine of the resistance for denouncing Clarence Thomas for using bad language n her presence.

Now, Breitbart reports, we have a woman who was gang raped on Tahrir Square in Cairo Egypt during the heady days of the Arab Spring. And who has been summarily dismissed from her job.

Breitbart offers details of the assault. If you choose, you can read them. They are beyond harrowing. It emphasizes that Logan is receiving different treatment as a rape victim because her experience does not fit the narrative.

We are only a few months removed from such hero treatment being lavished on women who suddenly came forward with implausible and unproven allegations of decades-old misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Those women were universally described as “survivors,” but Lara Logan never is. Criticism of those women – even polite questions about the inconsistencies in their claims – was denounced as “attacking” them, but Lara Logan enjoys no such courtesy. The left long ago decided Logan is a “right-wing shill,” and that political identity trumps everything else about her.

Logan did not receive much deference from CBS News after suffering horribly on their behalf. She evidently parted company with the network months ago, a parting so low-key that both supporters and detractors assumed she still worked there and might have been sacked for her interview with Ritland. CBS representatives this week were vague about exactly when she left.

That’s not the departure one would expect for a journalist who doggedly stuck with a major story despite clear threats to her safety and went on to survive a brutal mass rape. No company is obliged to employ anyone in perpetuity, of course, but Logan’s treatment has been paid scant attention by the people who would normally erupt in outrage if a woman with her background was disrespected.

Why the silence over Logan? Aside from her supposed right-wing tendencies, there is the simple fact that her public gang rape defies the Obama administration narrative of democracy breaking out in Egypt.

The fall of Hosni Mubarak was supposed to be a lovely flowering of democracy. The view Lara Logan got of the proceedings from that filthy street in Cairo did not fit the narrative, so her story does not loom large in the media’s collective memory.

4 comments:

Sam L. said...

The left is exceptionally good at ignoring what it wishes to ignore. (Truth HURTS.)

UbuMaccabee said...

The Democratic Party is the political arm of the Leftist media, not the other way around. The unelected Leftist media presumes to run the country.

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

The Media.

Watch the exchange between Trump and Jeff Zucker if you want to see the first time an elected head of government openly criticized a media chieftain by name, on camera. It was extraordinary. We know what followed.

Sam L. said...

It seems to me that the "media" are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Dem party, not the other way round.

UbuMaccabee said...

Sam, I used to agree with you, but I think it really is the other way around. The Media decide who is allowed to stay and who must go. They decide who cannot run for office and who is acceptable.

If anyone crosses the Media, a hit goes out. Two weeks later, everyone discovers that you made a pass at a 17 year old girl 35 years ago in a mall. A woman from high school remembers a salient fact 30 years later. Child porn, rape allegations, racist comments, more racist comments, misogyny. The list goes on. Big Media + Fusion GPS = public humiliation followed by an echo chamber of calls to "step-down." If you are part of the team, you are untouchable (Hillary Clinton and her sham foundation). If you are the enemy, they arrange a coup and a 24/7 media blitz of hysteria.

The people who own the Media are more powerful than anyone I can think of in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party doesn't have the money or the pull to own Carlos Slim or Jeff Bezos, Sumner Redstone, Larry Page, or Brian Roberts.