Media Mishaps

Give Alec Baldwin, the shortest-fused guy in Hollywood, a talk show where he tries to be David Susskind?  Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Alec Baldwin's MSNBC Friday night talk show, which tried to be as low-key as Baldwin is not, premiered in October and ended in November.  MSNBC has confirmed that "Up Late with Alec Baldwin" has been canceled as a result of his altercation with a photographer, during which he used a homophobic slur.  It gave both Baldwin and the network, who parted ways by mutual agreement, the opportunity they needed to sever ties with each other; MSNBC was frustrated by the strife on the set of "Up Late" and Baldwin was getting angry with having to deal with the suits.  So I've been led to understand.  This may all be conjecture, but I never claimed that this blog was a legitimate news source.  MSNBC is supposed to be just that, and yet it gave a talk show to an entertainer.  And instead of stopping at Chris Matthews . . .

Anyway, this looks like a severe setback for Baldwin, who was actually riding high in the months leading up to the premiere of "Up Late," thanks to his strong performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine.  But the loss of his MSNBC show is really no loss at all; he's not a journalist, and he still has his acting career.  Which brings me to the unpleasant subject of Lara Logan, the CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent with the movie-star looks and movie-star charisma who's now trying to save her journalism career.

Logan, who reported and aired a story implicating malfeasance in the Obama administration's handling of the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which was based on an eyewitness account from Dylan Davies, a British security officer working for a company the State Department hired to provide security for the consulate.  Davies said he saw the attack and saw the body of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens at a local hospital.  His account of the attack suggested a lack of attention on the part of the Obama administration regarding the dangers in Benghazi and the possibility that a terrorist attack might happen there, and it clearly put the White House in a defensive position to defend the indefensible.

Except that Davies's account wasn't true.  He was nowhere near the consulate when it was attacked, and he never saw the ambassador's remains.  He'd changed his story - the story he gave his firm and the FBI had had none of these salacious details - to promote a book he had written, which was published by a company owned by . . . CBS.  And so, there was nothing to suggest that President Obama was guilty of malfeasance of any sort.     

Oh yeah, here are a couple of other things you may not be aware of . . ..  The South African-born Logan once insinuated in a speech that the U.S. government lied about the attack on the consulate and publicly expressed her hope that the U.S. would "exact revenge" for the attack.  Also, her husband, Joseph Burkett, worked for a public relations firm that the Bush administration used to get out news about how well the war in Iraq was going.  She's now on leave from her job, and, like Baldwin at MSNBC, may not be back.

In May 2007, I featured Lara Logan on my beautiful women picture blog,  saying that she had "filed many reports from the war in Iraq for '60 Minutes,' and her work there has been first-rate."  What, was I crazy?  Well, no.  Her reports from Iraq were still good, and one report on a fierce battle in Baghdad was so hard-hitting that CBS didn't want to air it.  Also, she has done stories not connected to Iraq that have been examples of solid journalism.  But that was then and this is now.  With the Benghazi story, Lara Logan has not just jumped the shark, she's pole-vaulted over it.  Although I'm leaving my post of Lara Logan on my other blog - because I posted it at a time when she was not a discredited sensationalist - I edited out the quote above, and I won't be featuring her on my beautiful women picture blog again any time soon.  Or later.

Things could be worse for Baldwin and Logan.  After all, look at the child-sex scandal former New York rock radio DJ Dave Herman got himself into - and the less said about that creep, the better.