CBS News’ Lara Logan rushes to Calvin Ayre’s defense

Reporter Michael Hastings recently garnered a shitload of press with his Rolling Stone article on the American military commanders overseeing the war effort in Afghanistan. In fact, his unvarnished reportage of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s frank opinions of the political leadership in Washington directly led to McChrystal’s compelled resignation from his position as top commander in the field.

CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan has spent a lot of time in war zones, including Afghanistan, so clearly she’s got some serious cojones (bigger than mine, let me tell you) and she shows no hesitation to speak her mind when she feels strongly about something. And while she has a lot to say about Hastings’ journalistic integrity, she also calls out Rolling Stone for ‘ginning up’ the article with a pull quote headline featuring words that McChrystal never actually uttered. To wit…

“Rolling Stone magazine put their own spin on this. They said that the greatest enemy for McChrystal is the wimps in Washington. Nowhere in the article does McChrystal refer to ‘the wimps in Washington.’ That’s Rolling Stone magazine, how they chose to cast this, to make it as sensational as possible. And that was with intent.”

The rather deplorable situation Logan lays out here is remarkably similar to the tactics employed by Forbes magazine in its 2006 ‘Billionaires’ issue, in which the editors implied that the phrase ‘catch me if you can’ had come out of cover boy Calvin Ayre’s mouth as a direct challenge to the U.S. authorities that frowned on the business of online gambling. Calvin received some flak from some industry folk, who unfairly viewed the provocative comments attributed to him as being the straw that broke the Department of Justice’s back, and brought on the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act just a few months later. This would have been a patently ridiculous presumption even if Calvin had uttered those words, but especially so given that the phrase in question was entirely the invention of Forbes reporter Matt Miller, yet that’s not how it was framed (and we use that word intentionally) when the issue was laid out.

So the next time you read of some inflammatory rhetoric attributed to this or that public figure, you might do well to remember Marvin Gaye’s wise old adage to “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” Read more.

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Tags: Article, Calvin Ayre, Forbes, lara logan, rolling stone

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