I doubt leftie journalists like it when their cherished slogan, Speak truth to power, gets thrown back in their faces, especially since they're the actual power. Now, along comes CBS News correspondent Lara Logan who, in a recent interview, simply spoke a truth that non-journalists have known since forever:
CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan critiqued the international “liberal” media while holding up outlets like Breitbart as the opposite side of the coin.
Logan spoke to retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland about a variety of topics on Friday for his Mike Drop podcast (h/t Breitbart), and the conversation eventually turned towards her agreement with Ritland that “the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.” As Logan lamented that voter registration among journalists shows that the media is out of balance, she came with a metaphor to explain how she believes the press is tinged by the sameness of opinion.
“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.Logan continued by saying President Donald Trump‘s press coverage is a case in point of how the media produces a “distortion” by boiling things down so that “there’s no grey. It’s all one way.”
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.”
“If it doesn’t match real life,” Logan said, “something’s wrong.”
The conversation went on with Logan citing recent comments from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, saying the media has “abandoned our pretense or at least the effort to be objective.”
As she argued that media sources on the left and right regularly push their preferred narratives and “do terrible things,” Logan determined that the weight of the liberal media overwhelms “the other side” unless people actively seek outlets like Breitbart.
The discussion continued with Logan trashing news reports based on single, anonymous government sources, calling it an abandonment of journalistic standards.
“That’s not journalism, that’s horseshit,” 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.”
Towards the end of the interview, Logan seemed to acknowledge that some will see her remarks as controversial, saying “this interview is professional suicide for me.”
I don't think Logan goes far enough, frankly. She hedges when she says, "We bear some responsibility for [fake news]." [emphasis added] I'd say that she and her ilk bear most of the responsibility. Sure, there's fake news emanating from the right, but not at nearly the same rate and volume. In any event, we live in an era in which Logan's admission comes off as revolutionary, even though it is, in reality, trivially true.
Instapundit quotes 2006-era Bill Clinton as to why the media are so leftist:
…[Bill Clinton] said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies — and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.
“We’re all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the ’60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate,” Clinton said. “Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations.”
People in the alt-media world contend that the legacy media are dying, but in my view, they're not dying fast enough, and they still have too much of the US public hypnotized into thinking their word is gospel. Sad, as a certain spelling-challenged tweeter likes to expostulate.
ADDENDUM: Why Does the MSM Keep Falling for Obvious Hoaxes? Because The Narrative matters more than truth, that's why.
Yeah, I remember the days when I got virtually all my news from the Washington Post. Then after 9/11 I discovered the internet and blogs like Instapundit. And I realized that the real bias in mainstream media is in what they DON'T report.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, good stuff here Kev. But sadly too many on the left remain willfully ignorant and refuse to put forth the effort to get the full picture.