60 Minutes' Lara Logan slams the 'mostly liberal' media for its coverage of Trump which she calls a 'distortion' of real life, as the award-winning CBS journalist admits she is 'committing professional suicide'
Famed 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan has broken ranks with mainstream media, claiming news outlets are now 'mostly liberal' and have become ‘propagandists’ while covering President Trump.
The South African-born foreign affairs journalist said that most of the American press is biased against Trump because journalists are overwhelmingly Democrats.
‘You say the media is mostly liberal,’ Logan told Mike Ritland on his Mike Drop podcast.
‘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.’
Logan said there isn’t much variety in viewpoints among mainstream news organizations.
‘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.
‘That’s 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.’
Logan said that media coverage of the president has been overwhelmingly one-sided.
‘For example, the coverage on Trump, all the time, is negative,’ she said.
‘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.’
‘Although the media has 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.’
She said that journalists no longer abide by reporting standards.
‘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, that’s horses**t.’
Towards the end of the interview, she acknowledged some may perceive her comments as controversial.
'This interview is professional suicide for me,' she said.
Logan, who made her name as a journalist by reporting from dangerous war zones, is a controversial figure in the world of television news.
In 2013, CBS retracted a report she did on 60 Minutes about the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
In the report, Logan interviewed a British security contractor, Dylan Davies, who claimed to be an ‘eyewitness’ to the attack.
Davies, who went by the pseudonym ‘Morgan Jones’, told Logan that during the September 11, 2012 attack in Libya, he scaled the wall of the burning diplomatic compound, hit a terrorist in the face with a rifle, and later saw the corpse of Ambassador Chris Stevens in a local hospital.
The report was cited by Republicans and conservatives who blamed the Obama administration for being ill-prepared for the attacks.
But it later became apparent that Davies told a different story to the FBI.
CBS conducted a review of the matter and found that other media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post were correct in reporting information that proved Davies fabricated the claims he made in the interview with Logan.
The network then asked Logan to take a leave of absence. Logan herself appeared on the CBS morning show to apologize.
In her comments on Friday, Logan criticized Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog which investigated the claims that were made in her retracted 60 Minutes report.
‘I made one comment about Benghazi,’ Logan said in Friday’s podcast.
‘[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.’
Before the Benghazi controversy, Logan’s career took a traumatic turn when she was sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring protests in February 2011.
The attack was so brutal that she needed to be flown back to the United States, where she was hospitalized for four days.
‘There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying,’ she said months later.
‘I thought not only am I going to die, but it’s going to be just a torturous death that’s going to go on forever.’
