South African-born Lara Logan, CBS News’s chief foreign correspondent, has spent most of the last decade covering the tumult in Middle East. A talented and courageous reporter, she has been critical of America’s superficial news coverage of the Iraq war. As she recently told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, America has never been shown the whole horrific story of the war that should never have happened, and its devastating effects on our troops, the Iraqi people and the country.
Last Friday, covering the chaos in Cairo, Logan was separated from her camera crew, grabbed by a gang of thugs, beaten and repeatedly sexually assaulted. Rescued by a group of Egyptian women and some soldiers, she was flown back to this country and hospitalized.
Logan’s an attractive woman, in her late 30s, and that has become the focus of America’s media coverage. Until a couple of decades ago, when a pretty woman was raped, the standard line was “she asked for it.” It was stupid and cruel then, and it’s stupider and crueler now, because 21st Century America is allegedly not as sexist as it once was, and smarter. But virtually every story about Logan’s attack referred to her appearance, suggesting that she had “asked for it.”
Men and women, bloggers, news services, newspapers, high and low, someone named Simone Wilson at L.A, Weekly, for God’s sake, all tut-tutted and tisk-tisked and thus excused the thugs and censured Logan.
None of it is worth repeating here, because it is the same old twisted trash that has kept America wandering in a moral wilderness since the Puritans arrived on Plymouth Rock four centuries ago, and it is everywhere. It took Google about 10 seconds to locate over 55 million references to Logan.