Lara Logan might be CBS News’ foreign correspondent, but the respected journalist had some frank words recently for her colleagues and what she called the “liberal” media, even calling her admission about reporter bias “professional suicide.”
Speaking on the “Mike Drop” podcast, hosted by retired Navy Seal Mike Ritland, Logan said you can see the bias in how voter registration among journalists leans overwhelmingly Democrat:
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, right?… So the facts are on the side of what you just stated. Most journalists are left or liberal or Democrat or whatever word you want to give it. I always joke about the other 14 percent were too lazy to register. And there’s maybe one percent that’s on the right.
CBS News' Lara Logan on US media: "Although the media has historically 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" pic.twitter.com/rkVstDuKBh
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 18, 2019
Logan also offered a metaphor to demonstrate how left-leaning media distorts truth due to their narrow scope 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.
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 press coverage of Donald Trump was a “distortion” of the truth, because journalists present the news in a way that “there’s no grey. It’s all one way.”
“If it doesn’t match real life,” she said, “something’s wrong.”
Lara Logan isn’t the first mainstream reporter to reveal liberal media bias
In 2001, CBS News Bernard Goldberg exposed reporters’ widespread leftist bias when he published his book “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” which reached number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Goldberg would later claim that 85 percent of journalists voted for Barack Obama.
In 2017, the Media Research Center found that 91 percent of media coverage airing on ABC, CBS and NBC news had been negative toward President Trump.
Toward the end of her interview with Ritland, Logan said of her revelations about the media’s agenda, “this interview is professional suicide for me.”
It’s not often someone is willing to put their professional career at stake to expose the truth, but Logan’s courage and dedication to honesty does not go unnoticed.