'Logan's Non-Run'

Mark Steyn on CBS reporter Lara Logan’s assault in Egypt, and why the backstory as to its cause is a non-story as far as her industry is concerned:

Way back when America’s daily papers were actually profitable, there was a cynical formula used by editors to determine news values that ran something like this:

One dead American equals ten dead Frenchmen equals one hundred dead Russians equals one thousand dead Africans.

The dying monodailies of the Democratic Party’s court eunuchs have refined the formula: Six million dead in the Congolese civil war don’t equal one Iraqi prisoner being led around Abu Ghraib on a dog collar – because there’s no way to blame the former on Bush and Rumsfeld. Likewise, in domestic terms, if a mentally deranged loner of no party affiliation or political philosophy whatsoever shoots up a Congressional grip-and-greet it must be because of Sarah Palin’s inflammatory use of metaphorical terms such as “target” and “campaign”, and we need to establish a “National Institute of Civil Discourse” in Arizona headed up by Bill Clinton (whose most recent contribution to “civil discourse” was to compare the Tea Party to Timothy McVeigh) and George H W Bush (who’s so unfailingly civil he feels it would be bad form not to get played for a sap one mo’ time). On the other hand, when legions and legions of grunting, illiterate, foul-mouthed “educators” intimidate their opponents’ families and brag of wanting to gangbang “teabaggers”, there are no civility issues whatsoever.

Caroline Glick suggests that the media now operate to a hierarchy of victimhood, but even that doesn’t fully account for their reaction to what happened to one of their own on Friday February 11th. Within minutes of Mubarak’s resignation, the CBS reporter Lara Logan, covering events in Tahrir Square, was set upon by a 200-strong mob who stripped her, punched her, beat her with flagpoles, and subjected her to a half-hour sexual assault by multiple participants while shouting “Jew! Jew!” She’s not a Jew, and she doesn’t look the least bit like the hook-nosed stereotypes to which Arab cartoonists are so partial. But then, if you’re the kind of Egyptian who thinks Mubarak is a “Zionist” and that the Mossad are putting GPS on sharks and sending them to terrorize sunbathers at Sharm el-Sheikh, she’s close enough.

What’s striking about this story is not so much that her own employer, CBS News, chose not to run it until over three days later – on the following Monday – but that in the intervening period they pumped out the same sappy drivel as everybody else – “Egypt’s New Age Revolution” (60 Minutes), “Egypt Proved Change Is Possible, Sexy And Cool!” (CBS Sunday Morning) – even as they knew there was another side to the story, and that their own correspondent was lying in the hospital traumatised because of it.

In 2004, Robert Spencer wrote that in the wake of 9/11, the new slogan for the left, including the MSM was “stay quiet and you’ll be OK,” based on the orders Mohamed Atta barked to the passengers on the plane he hijacked on September 11th.

It was a lie then, and a lie now, but apparently the MSM wishes to continue the fiction. There’s a reason why blogger Ace of Spades has dubbed the MSM the “Make Believe Media.”