CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan called the media “mostly liberal,” and critiqued the overwhelmingly one-sided coverage of President Donald Trump in a recent interview with U.S. Navy Seal, K9 dog trainer, and author Mike Ritland on his “Mike Drop” podcast.
“You say the media is mostly liberal,” Logan said to Ritland. “I agree with you. It’s true. Why can I say that with certainty? Well first of all I’ve been part of this for all my life, I’m 47 now and I’ve been a journalist since I was 17 and the media everywhere is mostly liberal not just in the U.S., but in this country 85 percent of journalists are registered Democrats so that’s just a fact.”
She also came up with an analogy to explain how she believes the press is affected by the common 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,” she said. “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.”
She added, “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.”
Logan said Trump’s press coverage is an example of the media creating a “distortion” by reducing things down so “there’s no grey. It’s all one way.”
“When they simplify it all [and] there’s no grey,” she said. “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, the coverage on Trump, all the time, is negative. There’s no mitigating policy, or event or anything that has happened since he was elected that is out there in the media that you can read about, right? Well, that tells you, that’s distortion of the way things go in real life.”
CBS’s Lara Logan — a hero to truth – https://t.co/ie5Z4rY1fg – @washtimes Here’s something you won’t read about everyday — a journalist in the mainstream media speaking publicly about the left-leaning bias of the mainstream media. But that’s what CBS’s Lara Logan just did.
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) February 18, 2019
Further in the conversation, she said there was “some merit” in calling those in the media “propagandists.”
“Although the media has always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense or at least the effort to be objective today,” she said. “We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that.”
Logan then cited recent comments from former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, saying the outlet had become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”
She said many journalists have abandoned traditional journalism practices in reporting when it comes to the Trump administration.
“Standards are out the window, I mean you read one story after another or hear it and it’s all based on one anonymous administration official, former administration official, she said. “That’s not journalism.”
“Responsibility for fake news begins with us,” she said. “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.”
She also acknowledged that some will see her remarks as controversial and said, “this interview is professional suicide for me.”
