Tag: 60 Minutes

Lara Logan in the news again?!?


Lara-Logan

Yes she is and it’s because of that disastrous segment she did on 60 Minutes about the attack in Benghazi.  That story was one of many concocted by Obama’s opposition to show the ineptitude of the administration but like so many of the other stories it shriveled and died because there essentially was nothing there.  That hasn’t stopped members of the #DemonicGOP or the press, especially FoxNews from regurgitating stale and inaccurate assertions and rallying politicians to join in the chorus of ‘just how bad the Obama administration is’.

Logan’s hit piece for 60 Minutes however tops the cake and is a case study of how low she and CBS News have gone to imitate the yellow journalism of the conservative opposition.  I remarked how (T)his is on the magnitude of FoxNews if not worse, before I learned CBS News is now being run by someone who once worked for FoxNews.

Few seem to realize that a former Fox News exec became the head of the CBS News in February 2011.  He is David Rhodes…….

Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel’s Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001.

Brit Humes of FoxNews has even gone on record to attest to Rhodes’ bona fides as a conservative journalist. What Logan et. co did was to base their story on what happened in Benghazi the night a US diplomat was killed on the word of a liar they knew was a liar before they even put him on the air!

In the “60 Minutes” interview, Davies described scaling the compound’s 12-foot wall during the attack and knocking one terrorist fighter to the ground with the butt of his rifle. He also spoke about seeing Stevens dead in the hospital, and said Stevens had expressed security concerns just hours before the attack.

But The Post obtained an incident report from Sept. 14, 2012, that revealed Davies provided his employer with a written account of the events that differed greatly from what he said on “60 Minutes”

In other words the source for 60 Minutes segment on how terrible the Obama administration handled the Benghazi affair lied….the segment therefore, was a lie and it was produced under the tutelage of a former FoxNews executive. The symbiosis of conservative ideology with journalism has never been more stark than with this example.    Let’s be clear on one thing, the time line; the source’s account of what he did and what took place that fateful day was clearly on record for CBS to verify before they aired his interview.  He had a written account on record three days after the Benghazi tragedy that was completely contradictory to his TV account that CBS knew about but ignored.

But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

In Davies’s 21 / 2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up.”

He learned of Stevens’s death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

The State Department and GOP congressional aides confirmed that Davies’s Sept. 14, 2012, report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, was included among tens of thousands of documents turned over to lawmakers by the State Department this year.

Were it not for the due diligence of those in print media, CBS would have let their source’s own handwritten account which contradicted what they broadcast  remain swept under the rug; the apology Logan issued was sorrow at being caught, which brings me to the other aspect of this story.

Lara Logan has been the water boy/girl and a strident supporter for super power imperial adventures for a very long time.

Logan sounds like the most devoted member of McChyrstal’s P.R. staff or even his family…..Logan has done good and courageous reporting over the years, but she clearly sees herself as part of the government and military, rather than an adversarial watchdog over it

I took a shot at Logan on the pages of Miscellany101

It’s second nature to her, it’s her job to blur distinctions and make things equivalent when they are not.

Logan like so many others on todays’ airwaves is there to sell news and anyway that can be done to make it attractive, sexy, glamorous is what news executives want.  They are not interested in the truth and they will use anyone/thing at their disposal to increase reader/viewership.  Logan is a tool of corporate media….a misplaced, misused one.  In this latest mishap she has relegated herself to the pile of irrelevance.

Related articles

Raped by hands


Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent who was assaulted in Cairo, Egypt during the “Egyptian revolution” has finally come out and spoken about what happened to her.  It sounds very dramatic and Logan does an excellent job of provoking the imagery, stimulating the schemata but it rings flat on my dead old ears.  Not because I assume the typical attitude of many who don’t believe a rape victim’s story or dismiss it but because Logan, a member of the main stream media elite, has a job that depends on her exciting such mental images of noble wars of empire and chivalrous soldiers intent on serving the Nation or rescuing damsels like herself from the hordes of grabbing, prodding savages of far away place.

Initially we were told she was raped or suffered a violent assault.  Now we are told, by her, that she was ‘raped by hands’ an equally evocative expression.  It’s second nature to her, it’s her job to blur distinctions and make things equivalent when they are not.  Cairo, the city where the ‘rape by hands’ took place is 20 million strong and about a million of them were in Tahrir Square the night Logan’s attack took place.  Raping by hands undoubtedly happened to a lot of people there, men and women, who were jammed in an area not meant for their numbers.

Logan had previously been expelled from Egypt by the Mubarak regime, who at that time was an ally with America in its war on terror, but she was able to re-enter the country shortly thereafter. It appears even from her account she was recognized or identified as being a spy, an Israeli, a Jew or any other appellation to single her out from the rest and then set upon, but how and by whom it is not clear.  One account seems to suggest that Logan wasn’t raped by hands, but rather man handled as she was led away from the place where she was reporting.   Another female reporter claims she too was groped, fondled, sexually assaulted by the crowd but certainly not to the extent that her clothes were ripped off or that she felt fear for  her life.  Instead, this female reporter  claims, defiance at how she was violated;

In the middle of that crowd I suddenly found hands in the intimate parts of my body. When I realised that this was not a one-off incident, but that many people were interested in touching me, I felt vulnerable and became angry.

In an instinctive response, I wanted to smack the molesters, but they disappeared fast. Touching and pulling went on for some minutes when people around me started to notice what was happening.

My Egyptian friends and other friendly Egyptians closed the space around me, and gave precise instructions: while I was pulled forward, they told me to finger point to those people who were molesting me. They looked different from the bright, celebrating faces. After taking me out of the crowd, my new bodyguards turned against the attackers. An awful quarrel started.

With the right embellishment, the account above can turn into ‘rape by hands’ as well as a fear of an impending death, but the above account doesn’t give one that impression; moreover, she doesn’t seem to have assumed the role of  victim and is far too combative to warrant collective sympathy.  I get the impression she would and could readily wipe the floor with her attackers and instead of pitying her want to cheer her on to just such an end.  Yet that’s not what I  feel when I  listen to Logan.

What happened to her reminds me of  an amplified Adela Quested of A Passage to India, the book by E.M. Forster.  Quested an adventurous woman visiting colonized India  became confused after venturing alone into one of the Marabar Caves and emerges from it accusing her host of raping her.  What really happened is a story of human psychology, where a young woman backed up by a cultural belief in her absolute desirability focuses her rage and confusion on one man because of the damage he and by extension everyone in his group, i.e. Indians  have done to her emotional well being.  Logan reminds me of that Quested character , as she spoke of how she was penetrated front and back by the hands of rape during her 60 Minutes interview.  Yet all we have is her word.  None of the people who were with her have been interviewed, she does identify them and one was American, nor do we hear  from any of her rescuers even though she speaks pointedly of how they helped her.  Do we, the general public need to hear any of this or that?  Is it necessary to be allowed into Logan’s pain and suffering?  No, but Logan chose to reveal it to us, to take us there, and give a face to rape.  For me it’s hard to disassociate it from the other faces she’s given us in her role as a reporter.