Lara Logan, foreign correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes, said
Breitbart News offers “the other side” of news media relative to what
she described as a mostly left-wing and partisan Democrat news landscape
in the U.S. and abroad.
She offered her remarks in an interview
published last Friday with the Mike Drop podcast, hosted by retired Navy
SEAL Mike Ritland.
Ritland characterized U.S. news media
as “absurdly left-leaning” and supportive of Democrats, further
describing the status quo of American news media’s left-wing and
partisan Democrat biases as a “huge fucking problem” and “disaster for
this country.”
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.
WATCH:
Logan grouped Breitbart News and Fox
News as dissident outlets relative to the “mostly liberal” news media
landscape. She said:
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.
News media homogeneity cripples many
people’s desire for getting to the truth about political goings on,
determined Logan:
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.
Logan 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.
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.”
Logan cast Breitbart News as a useful
barometer 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, stated Logan. 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.
Logan dismissed news media claims allegedly rooted in singular
anonymous government sources as unreliable. “That’s
not journalism, it’s horseshit,” she said.
“Responsibility for fake news begins
with us,” said Logan, referring to journalists and reporters.
Logan recalled that Media Matters for
America (MMFA) targeted her following a 60 Minutes report
she filed related to the September 11, 2012, Islamic terrorist attack
on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. “I made one
comment about Benghazi,” remarked Logan, “[Then] I was targeted by
Media Matters for America, which was an organization established by David Brock, who has dedicated himself to the
Clintons. It was their known propaganda organization.”
In February of 2011, Logan was sexually
assaulted — and nearly murdered — by numerous men in Cairo, Egypt,
while reporting on the ousting of then-Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak. She shared some details of the attack’s nature.
“Piece by piece, they tore all my
clothing off, and just tore my body almost to pieces, and tore my
insides apart,” recounted Logan. “I saw people taking pictures. … I
remember fighting, being raped, and being able to sometimes push
people away, and then I remember just realizing that there were too
many of them — and it was over and over and over again — and that
there was always someone else when you could fight one person.”
Towards the end of the interview, Logan
quipped, “This interview is professional suicide for me.”