Lara Logan: This Interview 'Is Like Professional Suicide'

"This is the kind of interview that is like professional suicide for me," says former CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan. The reason? In a Friday appearance on retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland's Mike Drop podcast, she doesn't hold back when discussing the liberal media and fake news (Mediaite's headline calls it a "scorched-earth interview"). "You say the media is mostly liberal. Do I agree with that ... I agree with you, it's true. Why can I say that with certainty? First of all I've been part of this 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 US." But in the US, she cites a stat that 85% of journalists are registered Democrats. "I always joke that the other 14% were too lazy to register, and there's maybe 1% that's on the right." More from the interview:

• She offers up the metaphor of the Wailing Wall in Israel: "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 ... 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 ... even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me."

• "Someone very smart told me a long time ago that, 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? When they simplify it all and there's no gray. ... Life isn't like that. If it doesn't match real life, something's wrong."
• Ritland asks her how you fix it. Logan's reply: "It's the bane of my existence."
• "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 goes on to cite the media's "horses---" practice of relying on a single anonymous government source. "Responsibility for fake news begins with us."
• She goes on to discuss a story she did on Benghazi that "honestly I can tell you with absolute sincerity was really nothing to do with Hillary Clinton" but was the story of "two Delta guys ... who hired a plane and flew into Benghazi and went to save people... I wasn't thinking about Hillary and the election, I was thinking about an untold story. I waded into political territory very naively, and I paid for that, heavily."
• Politico's Michael Calderone takes issue with the previous point, tweeting, "Reminder: Logan's Benghazi report was discredited for journalistic reasons, not political ones."
• Most of the initial coverage of Logan's comments appears to be from the right (Breitbart, Townhall, the Daily Caller).
• At the Washington Times, Cheryl Chumley pens an opinion piece about the interview that declares, "Somebody give this woman a gold star. Her words may, in fact, prove 'political suicide' for her, but for the rest of us, they're the sweet sounds of truth—something that's been sorely lacking in the field of journalism of late. And that makes Logan not just brave for bucking a trend, but actually, a little bit of a hero."
• At the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer praises the "famously brave" Logan for "telling the truth." Hillyer goes on to make his own point about bias by citing a Feb. 17 New York Times article titled, "Republicans hope to sway voters with labels that demonize Democrats.” He writes, "In the past 60 years, has the Times ever run a piece whose theme is that Democrats are trying to 'demonize' the poor, victimized Republicans?"

(More Lara Logan stories.)