On Wednesday's AC360 on CNN, ABC's Ashleigh Banfield punted on Nir
Rosen's offensive Tweets against CBS's Lara Logan and tried to explain
them away: "
We're using a lot of electronics to get information
out as fast as we can nowadays before we can really digest the
ramifications of what we say...
And so, I'm certainly not going to cast aspersions on Mr. Rosen. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
Anchor Anderson Cooper turned to Banfield and Salon.com's Joan Walsh
immediately after playing his taped interview with Rosen during the 10
pm Eastern hour. Cooper first asked Walsh for her take on the
controversy, and she promptly criticized the disgraced journalist: "
I thought it was horrible, Anderson, and I assumed that he was making light of a sexual assault...So, I'm not going to call him a liar. Only he knows what he knew.
But it was incredibly insensitive, and even...aside from the sexual assault aspect,
to be mocking someone that you don't like who has been injured and mistreated, I would rather think that we don't have those responses...Maybe that's naive of me."
The CNN anchor then asked his ABC colleague, "When you heard his
Tweets, what did you think?" Banfield made her wishy-washy answer:
BANFIELD: Well, I think my first impression was
that it was horrifying, but I, you know, wanted to withhold judgment
until I knew the whole story, and I certainly think, Anderson, you and I
and everybody else in this business, we're using a lot of electronics
to get information out as fast as we can nowadays before we can really
digest the ramifications of what we say, and also, perhaps the
background to which we're referring. And so, I'm certainly not going to
cast aspersions on Mr. Rosen. Let he who is without sin cast the first
stone. But, you know, I hope that, for his sake, he's certainly going to
make amends and think before he Tweets next time.
She clearly wanted to give Rosen the benefit of the doubt, something that she was unwilling to do during a
May 4, 2000 interview with Dr. Laura Schlessinger on MSNBC:
BANFIELD: I'm going over a shopping list of things you are against:
divorce, living together, working moms, premarital sex, lying, immoral
behavior, homosexuality, family differences and day care. Now I'm going
to go over the list of some of the rules that you've broken in your
lifetime. You have been divorced. You lived with your current husband
before you married him, Lou Bishop. You also posed nude for photographs
and then lied about the photographs at first and then claimed the rights
to those photographs. You fired your own mother when she worked for you
and you have not spoken with her for fourteen years and you also put
[son] Derek into day care when he was three years old. You're also a
working mom. I guess I just have to ask you what leg do you have to stand on to talk about suggestions for people and the way they live?
On the other hand, Walsh again lashed out at Rosen later in the segment
for his insensitivity towards Logan: "Even as he talks to you, his
final self-defense, which is- well, it's terrible that it happened to
her, but what happens to a white celebrity reporter is now going to
obscure what happens to Egyptian women and non-celebrities- I think that's pretty poor, too. I think that it's our job to care about injustice and mistreatment wherever it happens....Just because she's white and just because she is a celebrity is really no reason to lose compassion."
The Salon.com editor-in-chief also tried to draw in right-of-center figures who also wrote negative things about Logan:
WALSH: If I can also just jump in and say, though, there are a
lot of people on the right who are not getting half the attention of Nir
Rosen who have said some pretty despicable things and are sticking by
them. There's a whole wave of people on the blogosphere-
Gateway Pundit and Debbie Schlussel- who are basically blaming Lara
Logan for her- for what happened to her because she dared to go report
on Islam, rather than treating it as this sexist, brutal religion, and I
would like to see those people come in for a little bit of criticism
and examination, too. It's not just what Nir said on Twitter.
Near the end of the segment, Cooper asked Banfield one more question:
"What do you think the response to all of them, you know, all these kind
of different comments that have been made online- what do you think it
says about the way people...view reporters or female reporters, or, you
know, sexual assault on women?"
The ABC correspondent's answer was revealing:
BANFIELD: ...I'm trying to get in the head of Mr. Rosen here, but I can
tell you this: from my experience covering rallies, demonstrations and
crowds in the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries, it's
always men. There are no women around. It is whipped into a frenzy
within seconds, and the TV cameras kind of fuel the fire. So,
add a blonde woman to the mix, and, good God, it's troublesome, and I
really, honestly, can't say that I don't know a lot of my female
colleagues who have been war correspondents who haven't had something
happen. I've had stuff happen. It's disgusting. But we have
just become complacent to it because we love what we do and it's part of
the deal, just like you got knocked in the head. You're not going to
stop doing it. It was unpleasant, but you know that it can happen, and
we sort of think it can happen, too, and I think probably Mr.
Rosen has heard it happens a lot, too. So, perhaps, he was thinking it
was just one more of these episodes that we really don't talk about. I don't- I never reported that stuff from the Middle East.
Even after trying to draw anti-Logan statements from the right into the
discussion, Walsh criticized uncompassionate statements from the left:
COOPER: Joan, do you think this says something about where we are as a society, in terms of how people are reacting to this?
WALSH: You know, it worries me a little bit, Anderson. I think that
there's just an immediate going to the barricades when something bad
happens to another fellow human being. I happened to be on
Twitter the night that Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital, and
there was kind of a debate, you know among people who criticize his
politics, and I was on the side- I was raised to say a prayer when you
heard an ambulance go by- in New York, you did a lot of praying. But,
you know, I think that we have lost that sense of compassion for one
another, and if- on the left or the right- that your first reaction to
the hardship of somebody you don't like is to say- oh, well, you know,
they brought it on themselves, or to make jokes about it- it's
disturbing.
- Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here.
