Lara Logan: The Pentagon's Favorite Journalist

I have long admired Lara Logan of CBS News. I have considered her quite a thoughtful and critical reporter in the past. And I credited that due to the fact that she was raised in South Africa and started her career outside of the United States.

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Logan has often been very well-informed as a foreign correspondent. She is also multi-lingual which added to a journalist's depth as they are able to employ more sources in foreign language. But after residing in the United States for quite sometime and due to her own stated ambitions to one day become a prominent, establishment journalist Logan has picked up the worst feature of the American press: subservience to power.

Most establishment journalists are often subservient to politicians and other elites and act no more than spokespersons because they do not want to offend their subjects and risk losing access. So in exchange for critical coverage, they can get access and secure those key interviews all the while defeating the whole point of getting an interview in the first place which is to subject power to great accountability. They seek to build an amicable relationship with politicians who will then agree to be interviews by them with a series of softball questions. Journalists are today much more interested with access than with critical coverage. That's the deriving culture.

Logan has picked up his nefarious tactic. It is a shame, because she once was quite critical of the Pentagon during the Iraq war. But her assimilation into the American press establishment has altered her paradigm. Recently, Gen. McChrystal, head of the Afghanistan war effort, has to step down after making critical comments of the president and other figures in the Obama administration which we published in Rolling Stone magazine.

Micheal Hastings, the author of the RS piece, has been praised by many for his critical piece of McChrystal but he has similarly been criticized by just as many, if not more, for allegedly costing this man's job because Hasting should have known better than to publish such comments and some are even saying that Hasting deliberately ignored the ground rules set by McChrystal that such matters are off-the-record. Hastings has defended himself by stating that there were no such rules and that he was simply doing the job the mainstream media should have done: which is offer critical coverage. Hastings accuses the mainstream press of trading criticism for access and had only offered laudable pieces on McChrystal, and that he was doing the duty of a real journalist.

One would expect Logan to agree with him that generals, given the history of the Vietnam war and the ongoing difficulties in Afghanistan, should be subject to a skeptical lens. But instead she attacks Hastings and defends McChrystal:

Her stupidest comment is that Hasting has never served his county akin to McChrystal. What does that have to do with it? Do you appreciate the subservient mindset here?! Her attitude is that military officials simply because they serve their country in the field of war should be immune from criticism by journalists because the latter are not as patriotic, according to Logan, as the former. By her standards in a democracy where the civilian leadership is in charge of the military, the military should be treated as sacrosanct and made to be above the criticism of mere civilians. Logan has it backwards. She believes that generals in times of war when American blood and treasury is being lost and with the great likelihood of more lose, the press which is supposed to be a critic should simply be deferential because the generals - whom are not infallible, of course, and may be wrong and leading the nation astray - have served their country.

This is such a bullshit argument and runs contrary to America's constitution and tradition. No man, least of that the military men, is above criticism. It does not matter if a journalist never served in the army, he can write whatever he chooses. And in that sense he may be doing the American people and America's security more benefit than the general. After all, the journalists who exposed government lies during the Vietnam war helped bring an end to hat war.

Likewise, we need critical coverage now. Hasting is a real journalist in that regard, while Logan has simply become a petty and ambitions shill for the Pentagon and joined the class of serving U.S. journalists whose role as they envision it is nothing more than spokesmen and women for elite power.

Hasting's interview: