A ‘60-Minutes’ Scandal: Lara Logan, Hotness and Benghazi Gone Wild

By John Grant

Lara Logan is a formidable TV reporter who has covered wars and other stories at significant risk. She’s supremely confident and has a powerful journalistic institution supporting her. But as a would-be ethical journalist, she seems to rely too much on her sexual allure and to be too tight with elite elements of the US military establishment.

When it comes to TV personas, Logan's epitomizes the adjective hot. She’s a beautiful blonde with a come-hither sultry South African accent. It may be crass to say, but she’s a delight to the eyes and the loins. It’s noteworthy that she’s married to a US civilian defense contractor from Texas she met covering the war in Afghanistan. She made her pro-militarist credentials clear in a 2012 speech where she called for vengeance by US “clandestine warriors” following the Benghazi attack.

As a journalist, Logan always seems to be falling off Albert Camus’ famous ridgeline separating the two abysses of Frivolous Art andPropaganda. In her case, the Propaganda abyss she’s falling into involves her breathy, seductive adoration of male “warriors” and adventurers she is inclined to report on and interview.

The dust-up over her October 27th 60 Minutes interview with a macho warrior cum bullshit artist about his fantasy heroics in Benghazi makes her sexy style a fair issue for discussion. Her story was timed perfectly and played right into the hands of men like California Rep. Darrel Issa, Senator Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity and other right-wing elements doing their mightiest to undermine the Obama administration.

It’s not that President Obama’s Libya actions don’t deserve fair criticism; it’s that Lara Logan’s story featuring “security officer” Dylan Davies (using the pseudonym Morgan Jones) posturing as a brave clandestine war hero turned out to be pandering, right wing militarist garbage. Even Fox News was leery of Davies and washed their hands of the man. Finally, Davies as Morgan Jones had produced a ghost-written book called The Embassy House published by Threshold Editions, a right wing imprint owned by Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Lara Logan's boss, CBS, something she failed to mention in her interview.

Logan says she worked on the story for a full year. Anyone who works in the journalism business should now be shaking his or her head. For a reporter with the institutional resources and clout Logan has at her beck and call not to check such a source’s claims to see if they jived with testimony on the topic he had given to the FBI simply beggars belief and deserves much more than the 90-second on-air apology she made last Sunday. That statement amounted to, “Oops! We’re really sorry.” Sixty Minutes producers say they have nothing more to say on the affair. They clearly hope it will just go away...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2040