Claiming that "U.S. news would drive me nuts" if she had to watch it, outspoken CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan used an appearance on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" to vent her frustration with war coverage in the American media.
She's already on record as claiming that Americans generally have no idea of how badly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going because of media suppression of pictures of American casualties.
Logan's opinions about the wars are derived from her intimate experience of combat conditions there. She's regularly on patrol with troops, and told Stewart, "I’m on high-value target raids, taking down some of the most wanted Taliban fighters and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, and I’m told … ‘Unless it’s Osama bin Laden, who cares about — you know, Mullah bin Shagged, whatever?’"
That's because for most of us, the war is now off our radar, as Frank Rich pointed out in his NY Times column this morning. From early 2007, Rich says, most Americans had decided the Iraq war was a mistake, wanted us out of the Middle East, and basically stopped thinking about it (see Rich's "Now that We've 'Won' Let's Come Home".
That view is backed up by Lara Logan's observations that “Nobody really understands. And the soldiers do feel forgotten. … We may be tired of hearing about this five years later. They still have to go out and do the same job. … More soldiers died in Afghanistan last month than Iraq. Who’s paying attention to that?”
More of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" interview with Lara Logan, plus video, is here.
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