LA Weekly Coverage of Lara Logan Assault Criticized by CNN, NY Times
It’s not just local readers who are offended by LA Weekly blogger Simone Wilson‘s coverage of the horrific assault on CBS reporter Lara Logan. On Saturday, Maureen Dowd of the NY Times included Wilson in her criticism of “vile bodies online” that “began beating up on the brave war correspondent” soon after news of the attack broke:
On her LA Weekly blog, Simone Wilson dredged up Logan’s romantic exploits and quoted a Feb. 3 snipe from the conservative blog Mofo Politics, after Logan was detained by the Egyptian police: “OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so, I would totally rape her.”
On CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday, Salon.com’s Mary Elizabeth Williams discussed the LA Weekly post with host Howard Kurtz. Williams said:
One of first things that happened when this story broke, I couldn’t believe it. Within hours of it, the first reporting was about was that story in LA Weekly, talking about her stunning good looks and her previous sexual history and saying the Egyptian people were consummating their celebrations by having a sexual attack on a blond reporter.
…basically what happened is there has been a backlash because she’s a woman and because she’s attractive, and her attractiveness was one of the first things that came into a story that’s about a violent crime.
The LA Weekly post in question also asserted that Logan was “repeatedly raped,” but offered no evidence or any original reporting to back this up. The initial CBS report made no mention of rape, saying that Logan suffered a “sustained sexual assault.” Emerging details of Logan’s assault indicate that she was not raped. At the time of this posting, the LA Weekly has still not issued a correction.
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