Howard Kurtz devoted a good part of "Reliable Sources" Sunday to the attack on CBS's Lara Logan when Egypt's Hosni Mubarak resigned as President.
As he addressed some disgraceful comments made about the incident by members of the media, Kurtz made it clear to viewers that Debbie Schlussel was a conservative, better never once depicted Nir Rosen as a liberal (video follows with transcript and commentary):
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."
Disgraced journalist Nir Rosen claimed on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 that he didn't know Lara Logan was sexually assaulted when she was attacked by protesters in Egypt. However, Rosen's own Tweets, which he subsequently deleted, revealed that he indeed know about the nature of the attack and tried to downplay it: "Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women."
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper aired his taped interview with the anti-war journalist during the 10 pm Eastern hour of his program. Cooper raised how Rosen brought the CNN personality into his attacks on Logan:
A brief unbylined Associated Press item today with a 9:15 a.m. time stamp, which appears to be based solely on an e-mail to an AP reporter (no other source for the quotes are cited), tells us that Nir Rosen seems to be backtracking from his Twitter claim of being "ashamed of how I have hurt others" in his comments about CBS reporter Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted by a Cairo mob on February 11.
The report also has an odd final sentence (not in the screen grab which follows) that could reasonably be interpreted as an admission that wire service personnel either saw or knew of what happened to Logan, and failed to report it:
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell was disgusted by "many intemperate" comments made about the news that CBS's Lara Logan had been brutally and apparently sexually assaulted while covering the Egyptian celebration that followed President Hosni Mubarak's resignation last Friday.
Not at all surprising, the only one he bothered to read on Wednesday's "The Last Word" was written by a conservative (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Nir Rosen, one of the more rabidly left-wing foreign policy commentators out there has finally gotten some just desserts after he ridiculed CBS News correspondent Lara Logan after she was assaulted by a mob in Egypt. After learning the news of the attack on Logan, Rosen took to Twitter to ridicule her and in the process revealed his deep anti-Iraq war bias.
"Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal," he wrote, apparently wishing that former U.S. general Stanley McCrystal and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper had been also sexually assaulted by a mob.
Rosen's disgusting comments got worse from there, even as the fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security attempted to rationalize his hatred. "Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don't support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too."