A longtime reporter for CBS News best known for her work on the network’s “60 Minutes” program is now publicly admitting that most journalists at major media companies are “absurdly left-leaning” when it comes to politics.
Lara Logan, a foreign correspondent for CBS, agreed with that assessment as she spoke from her own home on the the Mike Drop podcast, hosted by retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland.
It was Ritland who first said American media were “absurdly left-leaning” and that Democrat biases were a “huge f—ing problem” and “disaster for this country,” reported Breitbart News.
“I agree with that. That’s true,” responded Logan, who said it was a phenomenon not solely limited to America.
“The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.,” she said.
Logan explained there are a handful of news agencies that don’t march along to the leftist drumbeat, citing Fox News and Breitbart among them:
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.
(WARNING: Video of the interview with Lara Logan contains foul language at times:)
Logan explained it becomes more difficult to discern truth when so many media voices are politically driven.
“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 wondered.
“When they simplify it all [and] 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 noted, “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 also blasted the practice by many media outlets of using anonymous government sources.
“That’s not journalism, it’s horsesh-t,” she said. “Responsibility for fake news begins with us.”
Logan’s name made headlines around the world in February 2011 when she was violently gang-raped and nearly killed in Cairo while reporting on the removal of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
She commented on the attack, saying: “Piece by piece, they tore all my clothing off, and just tore my body almost to pieces, and tore my insides apart.”
“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.”
By the conclusion of the discussion, Logan said, “This interview is professional suicide for me.”
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