Dan Proft: We’re pleased to be joined again by Lara Logan, former CBS News foreign correspondent. You remember her, of course, for, at least in part, the stories she filed as a correspondent for 60 Minutes, as well. Lara, thanks for joining us again. Appreciate it.
Lara Logan: Thank you. Good morning.
Dan Proft: So what about the reactions from your colleagues and former colleagues, all the way from your sort of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and in one camp, and then Jeff Zucker and everybody at CNN and MSNBC and the other?
Lara Logan: Well, you know, I’m a little shocked. I got to say, because I didn’t expect that, you know, a whole, you know … the swath of mainstream media who constantly beat the drum of collusion would stand up and take responsibility for what they did. But I didn’t expect absolute complete denial. That’s … that’s somewhat stunning to me. And … you know, it’s really shocking to hear Cuomo say, “What did we get wrong? What did we get wrong?” It’s like it’s more, what did you get right? What did you actually get right? And I want to say two things that I think are really critical here. You know, Glenn Greenwald says it’s the WMDs of this generation. I got to say to you, I don’t agree with that, because … knowing whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction … was almost impossible for any journalist. How are you going to get that information? If the weapons inspectors couldn’t come up with a definitive conclusion, how could you? Do you know what I mean? As a journalist you have a responsibility to investigate? I don’t … I really don’t care what Jeff Zucker says. I’m absolutely stunned to hear that, “We’re not investigators. We’re journalists.” That’s right. We’re journalists. And part of our job … We have a duty and a responsibility to find out what the facts are. Just because somebody says something, and they have a title behind them, or you give them anonymity, but they used to have a big title that you think covers you, doesn’t mean you just put it out there. If you interview people, and they say horrible, shocking, racist, hateful things, you don’t put them on television, if there’s no real justification for them to say that. If it’s illegitimate, you don’t put it out there. You’re not a megaphone for the worst in humanity.
I feel like the media has been a megaphone for the very, very worst of the political establishment in this country for years.
And I feel like the media has been a megaphone for the very, very worst of the political establishment in this country for years. WMDs did not go on for years. And it was almost unknowable for any decent, reasonable journalist to find out and confirm. This was not unknowable. There are 400 million different examples of, of how you could have you know, shot holes in this narrative just by asking a few basic questions. And I’ll give you one quick example, General Mike Flynn. You know, President Donald Trump’s first pick of national security advisor. Why was it so important to destroy Mike Flynn and target him first and get rid of him? Because he was Trump’s cleaner. Remember Harvey Keitel in the Quentin Tarantino movie? He cleaned up the mess. That was what Mike Flynn’s job was. He was going to clean up the mess that the United States intelligence agencies had become under previous administrations. He was the guy who knew and was going to hold people accountable for not just misusing their power, but for breaking the law using the powers of surveillance of this country designed to protect itself from its enemies. It’s foreign enemies, using that against American citizens, which is illegal, even though the behavior has been normalized by the press. So you say this to people and they say, “Oh, don’t we always spy on political candidates during our elections?” No we don’t. It’s a crime. They spied on Bernie Sanders. They spied on Mike McCaul. They spied on Lindsey Graham. They didn’t just spied on Trump and Carter Page and people in the Trump campaign because they thought he was guilty of collusion, which by the way is not a crime, and I’m glad to hear Chris Cuomo say that. But I’m curious to know, why is the only thing it now, now that the Mueller Report is out? Why wasn’t Chris Cuomo and the rest of the media saying, “Hey, what are actually investigating?” Yeah, because collusion isn’t a crime. Conspiracy is, but no one’s talking about conspiracy. And and you know, one of the best things that Glenn Greenwald said, in my professional opinion, as a journalist is when he said, you know, that … that this is really a failure of journalism on an epic scale. It’s a failure, not because it was unknowable or impossible to verify. It’s a failure because we could have verified almost all of it. And we never even tried.
Amy Jacobson: Well, why do you think Democrats were so confident based on their information that there was evidence of collusion?
Lara Logan: So you know, here we get into the field, you know, of analysis and opinion, right? Because I don’t know 100%. I don’t have … I can’t tell you I sat down with Media Matters for America, the most powerful propaganda organization in this country that flies the flag for the progressive movement and it hijacks what it means to be liberal and Democrat and on the left, right? I wasn’t in their meetings. I’ve seen some of their strategic documents which say that they will resist the normalization of Trump in every single form. That he is not the President was elected to change this country. And you know, you only have to, you don’t have to go far. Find anyone who voted for Trump. 99% of them have said to me, “We voted for change. To change the establishment, the political establishment. Get rid of not just the establishment on the left, but on the right as well. So organizations like Media Matters for America, they have made it their, you know … It is their mission and their work and they’re extremely well-funded, and they have an army of propagandists working for them. And they have an army of journalists across the spectrum in the mainstream media who work hand-in hand-with them who parrot out their talking points who silence and target other people. You know, you hear this term all the time now — the weaponization of information. Why are civilian politicians and journalists talking about this? Because, again, they’re normalizing that behavior. This is what they do. They’re weaponizing information to use it as a propaganda tool.
They’re not acting as journalists, too many of us have become political operatives and activists. And the greatest collusion that I’ve seen has been between journalists and propaganda organizations.
They’re not acting as journalists, too many of us have become political operatives and activists. And the greatest collusion that I’ve seen has been between journalists and propaganda organizations, who are … who do not represent people across this country in spite of what they say, who are not interested in good journalism, in spite of what they say. They’re interested in (inaudible) journalists like Glenn Greenwald, and myself, and Ted Koppel, by the way of ABC, who came out and said exactly the same thing. When Trump says the establishment media is against him, he’s absolutely right. And that’s why they don’t want him to use his Twitter account, not because they object to everything he tweets, but because they want the weapons of information warfare. Remember, they’re the ones who talk about weaponization of information. They want to be the only one to hold those weapons. They don’t want anyone else to have them. And look what they’re doing with the tech companies — Google, Facebook, all of these people. They should be ashamed of themselves, because I don’t see them doing a whole lot of silencing of people who say that they, you know, that they think every white male in this country should be hanged and drawn and quartered and tortured, and that their response to everything. I mean, for goodness sake Don Lemon, as he’s now calling himself, he said that that white men are a greater terrorist threat than Islamic terrorism. Show me the armies across the world who are fighting armies of white men from America, trying to change the entire world order and to gain absolute power. Show me those armies. Perhaps, perhaps just maybe think for a moment that the incidents of Islamic terrorism in this country would be much higher if we didn’t have the United States deployed in Syria, Iraq, the Philippines … I mean … Mali, West Africa. And how many other nations, how many other governments are fighting that threat? It’s ludicrous to cherry pick these figures and take, you know, nonsense research from nonsense organizations that are pushing a political agenda and pretending that it’s something else. As journalists, your job is to think about the context and to challenge and to criticize and by the way, to know what the law says, because it’s really not that hard.
Dan Proft: Context and consequences are two watchwords I use all the time. I wanted to go back to something else you said, another watchword — analysis,. And one of the things we got over and over again was, “Trump’s not acting like he’s innocent. If he was innocent of these allegations against him,. he would just let mother quietly do his job …”
Lara Logan: I’m sorry. I cannot even contain myself that makes me so … but it just bothers me so much. It’s not … That is not analysis. And that is opinion, and it is a very subjective pejorative opinion. And you know what? It’s even worse than that. It’s guesswork, because they have no idea. There’s … I don’t believe anything that I have read about this president. Nobody was there in his head. You know, we were told he has the intelligence of a sixth grader. Really? He’s the only real estate developer that I know of whose name is known all over this world and was known before he campaign for president. Can you really be that dumb? How credible is that? How can you put people on television saying that when you haven’t even really examined the merits of whether that could be true or not?
Dan Proft: Well, and I just want to add something to that. I agree with that. That’s right, that opinion and the analysis of that opinion, but also something Rich Lowry wrote in a piece of this week to about, you know, they’re projecting onto Trump what he is or isn’t what’s going on in his mind, as you’re suggesting, based on his behavior. Rich Lowry just said it’s very easy to be relaxed about someone else’s reputation, and that says something else that seems to be a recurring characteristic of the DC press corps. They’re very relaxed about someone’s else’s reputation when it’s not a fellow traveler.
Lara Logan: Well, you know what I would say it’s much worse than that. I gotta be honest. I think you’re giving them all the free pass, because they’re not just being careless with someone else’s reputation. It’s a political assassination is what it is.
The stated objective of Media Matters for America, their propaganda organization, is to ensure that Trump is removed from office through impeachment or through the ballot box. They really don’t care about reputation or the truth or good journalism or anything else.
The stated objective of Media Matters for America, their propaganda organization, is to ensure that Trump is removed from office through impeachment or through the ballot box. They really don’t care about reputation or the truth or good journalism or anything else. They have a political agenda. And they will stop at nothing to see that that agenda is effective and successful. And if you look at their strategy, all of the things … They say they’re going to keep this president bogged down in legal challenges. They’ve overtaken an organization called CREW, which was supposed to be a bipartisan media watchdog organization, that has launched dozens and dozens and dozens … more than a hundred, if not hundreds of lawsuits against this president, challenging everything that he does. Challenging the administration, making sure that they do everything they can to cripple them, and prevent them from doing their jobs, and carrying out effective policy. They said that they will keep a constant drumbeat of news about cronyism and corruption and bad business dealings. And I mean, you name it, there’s not a thing that you’ve heard reported about President Trump that they don’t have in their strategic propaganda documents, okay? And, and why is no one in the media questioning any of this, in the mainstream media? Why are we so happy to beat that drum and all sing from the same hymn sheet and say things that we absolutely know are unknowable? We don’t challenge our sources. We don’t look at their motivations. We don’t try and explain that. And I’ll tell you why I say this. And I believe it so strongly, because when you look at the journalism … You gave a few examples right. Go to Sharyl Attkisson website. People say, “Don’t look at Sharyl. She’s right wing.” Sharyl is one of the finest journalists that I have ever known, and she was at CBS with me for years and years. She’s got a running list. That’s more than 70 examples of … of terrible, dishonest, non-factual reporting by the media on Trump. And there are many more examples out there, one that she uses that, you know, I was shocked by at the time was the bust of Martin Luther King being removed from the White House by Trump. You know, all the reporter I had to do was actually asked the White House if it was there, because it was obscured by the door. But he didn’t even do that. And it was reproduced all across the media. None of those other journalists asked either, and something even much more significant than that. You talked about throwing away people’s reputations. Look at General Mike Flynn. Okay, that man was a three star general, who was decorated as far back as Grenada when he lept off a cliff to rescue two United States servicemen who were being washed out to sea. Okay, this is a man who gave up all his life to represent his country, and they get away with calling him a traitor, but they also get away with reporting the most ridiculous nonsense ever … That he as a top intelligence official in this country, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, that he did not … was vulnerable to being blackmailed by the Russians. Okay, every red flag in my body is screaming when I hear those words. Because as the top intelligence official in this country, Mike Flynn knows better than anybody else, that every foreign diplomat on American soil is monitored by the CIA. That is one of the reasons the CIA exists, okay? And you know what? Foreign governments use their spy agencies to do the same thing to our diplomats to American diplomats on their soil. That is standard spycraft. Anyone calling himself a national security reporter, or anything like that, who didn’t report that at the time is just … should either be fired, or is just so incompetent, they don’t have the right to have that profile. And the other part of it is that counter-intelligence, not you know … They investigate every senior American official dealing with foreign ambassadors and foreign representatives. So Mike Flynn knows those things very well. If counterintelligence and the CIA have transcripts of his conversations, what can the Russians blackmail him about? Who actually asked that question? It’s unforgivable that we don’t ask these questions. It’s a dereliction of duty as journalists, and you don’t have to look very far to find what the law says. The law says the president cannot leak. The law says the president, the commander-in-chief, not just Donald Trump, every president his country’s ever had, that those … that one person in the act of speaking something, is an act of the de-classification. So when you read frenzied, hysterical headlines about the president leaking to the Russians in the Oval Office, you’ve got to know, as a decent journalists, that that’s not true. That hype and spin and political propaganda because the president cannot leak. When Obama announced that SEAL Team Six killed Osama bin Laden, that was an act of the de-classification, because no United States government official had ever officially, on the record acknowledged the existence of SEAL Team Six. They’re a Tier One organization. Black Special Ops, and we officially, as a country, don’t acknowledge their existence, until that moment. No one accused Obama of leaking that. Nor did they accuse, you know, Ronald Reagan of leaking that the … (inaudible) … organizations, one of the most clandestine facilities that this country has ever had, that most people don’t know exists. He announced its existence and its location at a press conference in the 1980s. No one accused him of leaking. It’s only this president that gets accused of leaking. It doesn’t matter what my feelings are. That’s a problem.
Dan Proft: Lara, there’s not going to get more substantive rip-roaring review than that. This is great. I wish we could just turn over the mic to you for the next half hour. Unfortunately, we can’t. Lara Logan, former CBS News foreign correspondent, thanks so much for joining us, really appreciate it and look forward to having you on again.
Lara Logan: Thank you so much.