Could those who are talking about dismantling the police address the problem of violence against women?

I remember when I was being gang-raped & beaten by a mob in Egypt, would have been great to have a police force to call then. Would that have been my white privilege talking? I’ve stood against racism all my life,don’t have a racist bone in my body. My heart breaks... https://t.co/U4USN1cMP6

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) June 9, 2020

"How do you know there's something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all and there's no gray — there's no gray."

Yesterday, I tried the episode of the Mike Drop (Mike Ritland) podcast with Lara Logan, but it's over 3 hours long and the first half hour is lightweight warm-up chatter. Did she really say she drinks alcohol at breakfast and drinks a lot generally? How long did it take her to say what America means to me is freedom — 10 minutes? I do understand how these podcasts work, but I couldn't watch. This morning I'm seeing....



And I see a tip about where to begin, so let me cue you to there, about 8,000 seconds in, and it really does get very good:



Ritland has asked her about political bias in the media, and Logan has opined that maybe only 1% of mediafolk are on the right. She continues:

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 — everything in life is complicated, everything is gray, right?, nothing is black and white... even the ones where you really think you're in the right, where you think you're right about everything. So... 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 — there's no gray. It's all one way. Well, life isn't like that. If it doesn't match real life... something's wrong.

For example, all the coverage on Trump, all the time, is negative. 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. That tells you that's a distortion of the way things go in real life. So my starting point is — okay, if I want to find the truth, where do I begin? I begin there, and I investigate from that point onwards. It's got nothing to do with whether I like Trump or don't like Trump or whether I believe him or don't believe in him or identify with him — whatever. I don't even want to have that conversation, because I approach that the same way I approach anything. I find that is not a popular way to work in the media today. Because although the media has alway been — historically, always been — left-leaning, we've abandoned our 'pretense' or at least the effort to be objective today.

I put "pretense" in quotes because she made air quotes. Abandoning pretense sounds like a move toward honesty, paradoxically. She's saying that before, they were biased and political, but they still believed that was wrong and tried to cover it up.

The former executive editor of the NYT has a book coming out — Jill Abramson — and she says, we would do — I don't know — dozens of stories about Trump every single day, and every single one of them was negative. She said, we have become the anti-Trump paper of record. Well, that's not our job. That's a political position. That means we've become political activists, in a sense. And some could argue, propagandists — right? — and there's some merit to that. So it doesn't mean that everything that's written is untrue. It doesn't say anything about where I stand on it. I do my job today the same way I've always done it.... I am consistent.... So if I'm doing my job exactly the same way... and suddenly today that makes me a Nazi and a fascist and a Trump lunatic, I'm like, how did we get there?

"The CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, made serious errors in an Oct. 27 report on the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya..."

"... and have been asked to take leaves of absence, the network announced Tuesday," the NYT reports.

The moves come after weeks of criticism directed at a “60 Minutes” report....

I'm not saying "60 Minutes" did a good job, but I'm skeptical of CBS's motives here. What will it take to get the full story on Benghazi? Less suppression. More information. Why aren't other reporters delving into this?

"60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration’s failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi."

Writes Professor Jacobson, observing that "the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack."

Here's the video:



From the transcript:

Andy Wood: I made it known in a country team meeting, "You are gonna get attacked. You are gonna get attacked in Benghazi. It's gonna happen. You need to change your security profile.... Shut down operations. Move out temporarily. Ch-- or change locations within the city. Do something to break up the profile because you are being targeted. They are-- they are-- they are watching you. The attack cycle is such that they're in the final planning stages."

Lara Logan: Wait a minute, you said, "They're in the final planning stages of an attack on the American mission in Benghazi"?

Andy Wood: It was apparent to me that that was the case. Reading, reading all these other, ah, attacks that were occurring, I could see what they were staging up to, it was, it was obvious. We have learned the U.S. already knew that this man, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Anas al-Libi was in Libya, tasked by the head of al Qaeda to establish a clandestine terrorist network inside the country. Al-Libi was already wanted for his role in bombing two U.S. embassies in Africa.

"Sexual violence is a way of denying women journalists access to the story in Egypt... It’s not accidental. It’s by design."

Says Lara Logan — who was attacked, sexually, by an Egyptian mob last year — about a very similar attack this past weekend on French journalist Sonia Dridi.

Bill Maher goes on "The View," begins with a suck-up to women, and gets feminist chill from Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

HuffPo just calls this "incredibly awkward." But it's a fascinating deployment and deflection of feminism:



Maher waltzes onto "The View" and delivers a prepared line that is obviously structured to reach out to the female daytime-TV audience. Joy Behar prompts him to talk about Sandusky, and Maher begins:

You'd like this...

(Because you're a woman.)

... Any institution where there's no women around — like The Church, like football, like the Middle East, like fraternities — it just goes to hell. You do need women as a moderating influence.

You? There's a feminist faux pas right in the middle of his effort at feminism. The audience is female, and he's saying "you" to them, but they are not the "you." Worse than that, seemingly without realizing it, he's dishing out old-fashioned male chauvinism: Women exist to moderate men. Men are the primary force in the world, but too much of that roiling, spewing masculine energy, and there's trouble. Come in, ladies, ground us, soothe us, care for us, tone us down, so our intensity doesn't boil over into destruction.

But Maher assumed — "You'd like this" — that female TV audience would feel flattered and not notice the message of subordination. And he assumed they'd enjoy hearing an insult to men. Quite aside from whether women appreciate negative stereotypes about men, underneath the insult was great pride in male achievements. Some men go too far, but maleness is central, even as femaleness is needed for moderation.

Nevertheless, Maher intended to appeal to women, to embed himself in the context of feminist values. He failed, even before Hasselbeck lit into him, but he did not realize that. He was perched in the center of the curved turquoise sofa, pleased at having presented himself as an admirer of women.

Hasselbeck begins: "That sounded very supportive of women." That is, she could see what he was doing, trying to seem feminist, though she doesn't say that it really was supportive: it sounded supportive.

"And I just want to go back to a time that bothered me... not for my own personal reasons... Forgive this idiotic Republican for bringing this to your brilliant mind..."

Talk about a moderating influence! She's stirring things up.

"In February of last year, Lara Logan was in Egypt and she was brutally attack by a mob there. She came back and said: 'There were hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull. I was in no doubt in the process of dying.'

"Now, prior to her coming back, Bill, you on your show said: 'Now that Hosni Mubarak has released Lara Logan, he must put her intrepid hotness on a plane immediately. In exchange, we will send Elisabeth Hasselbeck.'"

Hasselbeck sums up: "That wasn't that funny."

I'm virtually positive that Maher wasn't ambushed here. I think it was planned that Hasselbeck would read that indignant bit — it's all on paper, with 2 verbatim quotes — and sum up with an attack on the comedian's funniness. She did not cut more deeply. She could have said: You made a joke out of rape and you specifically thought it was funny to say that I should be raped. Is rape funny when it happens to a woman whose ideas you object to? You stood there on TV and named me as a person you'd want to hand over to a mob to be raped to death? That's your show, Bill?!

But she had it on paper, and it had her ending with a simple that's not funny. There's a female stereotype for you! It's the punchline to the old how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? joke. The "ambush" was gentle, and Maher was prepared:

"We do a comedy show for an audience that's perhaps different than your audience. You are a public figure. It was not aimed at you personally, but when you are a public figure, you are out there and you're fodder for comedians to make comments on."

Asked "Do you draw the line ever?" he responds, elegantly, "I do draw the line, but I also live on the line." He's a male, bursting with creativity and cutting recklessly, unmoderated by females, late at night, on HBO. "You have to be out on the edge to know where that edge is."

Hasselbeck scoffs, "Thanks for being the hero." That is: You're bragging about yourself. She's playing that moderating role assigned to women, dragging him down to earth. She demands an apology. The others on the sofa frame her complaint as a personal affront, because she was named, not a more general attack on Maher for making a joke out throwing a woman to a brutal mob to be raped to death.

If you had it to do over again, would you used that joke, Hasselbeck asks, "if you're so supportive of women"?, and Maher deflects her glibly, but still without acknowledging the gravity of wishing rape on his political opponent. He says: "If I had a crystal ball and knew I was coming here and had to spend my whole segment talking about it, no, I wouldn't. It really wouldn't be worth it."

That is, he still likes his joke, but it's such a pain having to fritter away his book-pimping spot dealing with her that it's not worth it. He brushes her off: "Worse things have happened to people." Worse than hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull? Yeah, it is true. Worse things have happened to people. Thanks for the info, Bill. And here you are,  talking to the women daytime TV has been explaining feminist issues to for decades!

Barbara Walters butts in to talk about herself. "I went through years of Baba Wawa. I survived." What a survivor! The message from Walters — who promotes feminism on most occasions, I think — is that Hasselbeck shouldn't take herself so seriously. She needs to learn to take a joke. Gilda Radner's delightfully charming imitation of Walters's speech defect is pretty much the same as Maher snarking about throwing Hasselbeck into a gang rape. Yeah. It's all comedy!

Hasselbeck claims some dignity in the end. She clarifies that it's not about her personal feelings, that she's "speaking on behalf of women," and that accountability is important. It's what she teaches her kids. Yeah, she's a mom. She's nice. She's folded back into the group, properly in place as one of the women on the turquoise sofa, arrayed sweetly around the man... moderating him.

"What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."

The NYT interviews, Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted in Egypt on February 11th:

She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands”.... She estimated that the attack lasted for about 40 minutes and involved 200 to 300 men....

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms. Logan’s pants off. She said: “Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me.”

And from Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News:

Mr. Butler, Ms. Logan’s producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were “helpless... because the mob was just so powerful.” A bodyguard who had been hired to accompany the team was able to stay with Ms. Logan for a brief period of time.

... Ms. Logan “described how her hand was sore for days after — and then she realized it was from holding on so tight” to the bodyguard’s hand.

From the CBS interview with Logan:

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying... 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..."

She says that to try to survive, she thought about her children, and when she saw them again: "I felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn't deserve...because I did that to them. I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them."