CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was recently promoted to "Chief Foriegn Affairs Correspondent," but no one noticed because OMG SEX SCANDAL! The Enquirer broke it, the Post semi-legitimized it, and it's been mentioned now in, like, real newspapers and everything. She slept with some people in Iraq! One of them was married! Some wonder if there is maybe a double standard. Would we hear about the dalliences of male journalists in the war zone? Well... sort of?
It's sort of a fact of war reporting that, you know, people are going to fuck around. They're far away from home, they're only in contact with other journalists, contractors, and soldiers. Passions run high! Etc! But the other fact of the matter is that if there is going to be a scandal of this nature, chances are decent that it will involve a man and a lady. Like in this Logan situation, where we're not hearing much about CNN correspondent Michael Ware, one of the alleged "beaus." Well, we're hearing plenty about him, but he's not in the headlines. So there's your sexist double standard, obv—we castigate the pretty lady for having sex and boys will be boys.
But there's an exception! (Once again, sort of.) Balk, refuting the idea that we wouldn't "read these stories about a male correspondent," reminds us of Dexter Filkins and John Burns. Filkins and Burns are star New York Times reporters who were involved in an imbroglio when another Times correspondent emailed their wives exposing their overseas extramarital affairs. That reporter, Susan Sachs, was fired. So the affairs of Burns and Filkins were exposed, yes, but most of the coverage was about that firing, and Howard Kurtz didn't even mention the names of Filkins and Burns, even though, as in Logan's case, those names were already "out there."
So yes everyone is being totally unfair to Lara Logan but whatever, it won't really cost her much more than a headache, we're pretty sure.
Back when Salman Rushdie had a Padma Lakshmi to go home to and a fatwa hanging over his smooshed-up genius head, he wasn't out very often. But now since Padma's fled and Islamic fundamentalism is on the wane, he is, as