British newspapers are reporting some truly shocking details about what happened to CBS's Lara Logan when she was attacked in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak resigned.
Originally revealed by the Sunday Times (subscription required), the following appeared in Monday's Daily Mail:
After further examination they were revealed to be from aggressive pinching.
It has also been revealed that she was stripped, punched and slapped by the crowd, which was labelling her a spy and chanting 'Israeli' and 'Jew' as they beat her.
And medical sources have revealed that marks on her body were consistent with being whipped and beaten with the makeshift poles that were used to fly flags during the demonstration.
An unnamed friend of the reporter told The Sunday Times: 'Lara is getting better daily. The psychological trauma is as bad as, if not worse than, the physical injuries. She might talk about it at sometime in the future, but not now.'
It is indeed interesting that these details are coming from British news outlets rather than American ones, in particular CBS itself. Some press members in the States expressed concern regarding the slowness in which Logan's employers revealed the incident.
Most notable was the Washington Post's Richard Cohen who wrote Wednesday:
Say what you will about New York's celebrated tabloids, they know news when they see it. This is why both the New York Daily News and the New York Post devoted their front pages to the sexual assault by a mob in Cairo of CBS correspondent Lara Logan. Say what you will about CBS, it either doesn't know what news is or felt that the privacy of an employee was more important than its obligation to inform the public. It has it backwards. [...]
As I'm sure even Logan would admit, the sexual assault of woman by a mob in the middle of a public square is a story. It is particularly a story because the crowd in Tahir Square was almost invariably characterized as friendly and out for nothing but democracy. In fact, some of the television correspondents acted as if they were reporting from Times Square on New Year's Eve, stopping only at putting on a party hat. In those circumstances, a mass the sexual assault in what amounted to the nighttime version of broad daylight is certainly worth reporting.
As Cohen pointed out, the New York Post reported details about the Logan attack that were also newsworthy:
A network source told The Post that her attackers were screaming, "Jew! Jew!" during the assault. And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of "being Israeli spies.
In Cohen's view, "[T]he assault and its undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism (Logan is not Jewish) is very troubling and, at the very least, suggests that not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind."
This was confirmed by the Daily Mail:
Witnesses say the mainly peaceful protests to end Mubarak's rule had taken a more violent turn after the Egyptian president announced his resignation.
The military presence controlling the amount of people entering Tahrir Square seemed to evaporate, and an angrier element had flowed in.
Yet, as Cohen accurately noted, "[T]he crowd in Tahir Square was almost invariably characterized as friendly and out for nothing but democracy. In fact, some of the television correspondents acted as if they were reporting from Times Square on New Year's Eve, stopping only at putting on a party hat."
Without question, American media were as jubilant about what was happening in Tahrir Square as the participants, and desperately wanted to paint a picture of a peaceful, democracy-loving crowd.
The same can be said of how the protests in Wisconsin are being covered. Union-backing so-called "journalists" don't want the public to see the signs being carried by "tolerant" liberals around Madison's Capitol building any more than they wished to disturb the image of a peaceful revolution in Egypt.
Potentially more unsettling is how these same media outlets for months depicted Tea Partiers as an angry, racist, gun-toting, violent, homophobic mob.
What a difference a protest's agenda makes especially if there are indeed acts of violence or hostile imagery on display.
(H/T Mediaite)
