During a February 15 interview with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland for his Mike Drop podcast, Lara Logan — former CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent — said that the U.S. and international news media is mostly liberal.
Logan concurred with Ritland’s characterization of the U.S. news media as “absurdly left-leaning” and supportive of Democrats. When Ritland went on to describe the status quo of the American news media’s left-wing and partisan Democrat biases as a “huge f***ing problem” and “disaster for this country,” she replied, “I agree with that. That’s true,” going on to describe the U.S. and international news media as “mostly liberal,” adding, “most” journalists are left-leaning. “The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.,” said Logan.
During the interview, Logan used an interesting metaphor to describe the very small position given to journalists outside the mainstream liberal spectrum:
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.
During the interview, Logan was critical of the mainstream media’s slanted coverage, breaking ranks with virtually all of her former colleagues: “We’ve become political activists in a sense. And some could argue, propagandists, right?”
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Logan did mention one notable exception, though, noting that former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson admitted that the paper publishes “raw opinion” against President Trump.
In a January article, we quoted excerpts from Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth, in which she said that the Times had a financial incentive to attack President Trump in its pages.
In her book, Abramson wrote this about her successor at the Times, Dean Baquet: “Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump.”
Abramson wrote of the Times under Baquet: “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.” She said the paper’s coverage of President Trump conflicts with the principles espoused by former Times publisher Adolph Ochs in 1896 — to report the news impartially “without fear or favor.”
Logan evidently sees Abramson and herself as two mavericks of a sort, among the vast army of leftist mainstream journalists.
During the interview, Logan sharply criticized news reports based on single, anonymous government sources, calling the practice an abandonment of journalistic standards.
“That’s not journalism, that’s horsesh*t,” Logan said. “Responsibility for fake news begins with us. We bear some responsibility for that, and we’re not taking ownership of that and addressing it. We just want to blame it all on somebody else.”
Toward the end of the interview, Logan recognized that her remarks would alienate many former media colleagues, saying, “this interview is professional suicide for me.”
Image: screenshot from YouTube video of Logan/Ritland interview
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