Simone Wilson, LA WEEKLY blogger, Dim-Brained Repeatedly Amid Lara Logan Controversy

If you were to ask me who my heroes were, almost all the answers would be journalists. Edward R. Murrow, Amy Goodman and the fictional Hildy Johnson (as portrayed by the crackerjack Rosalind Russell in Howard Hawks' seminal His Girl Friday) all inspire supreme admiration from me. Even though I believe that the media did not handle reporting of the Iraq War the way it should have--with a more sensitive bullshit detector, that is--I know how the endless red tape, government tampering, censorship and occasional danger can damper the best intentions I believe true journalists have.

However, I also believe that like Isaac Newton, for every action there is an equal and negative reaction. If you believe in God, you gotta believe in Satan too, and for every Murrow there is some writer without tact, class or even a basic understanding of research. One of these such creatures is Simone Wilson, a writer for LA WEEKLY, whose piece on Lara Logan's physical and sexual assault in Egypt reeked of sexism and a vile attempt at making the assault seem to be Logan's fault. Even her heading is completely absent of any attempt to sensitively portray Logan's assault, in favor of using this tragic event for sensationalism, reading "Lara Logan, CBS Reporter and Warzone 'It Girl,' Raped Repeatedly Amid Egypt Celebration."


There are several glaring problems with just this headline, the least of which is how shocking and nonchalantly it uses the 4-letter R word, my least favorite word in the world. I find it startling how it attempts to make Lara Logan out to be a celebrity with the moniker "Warzone It Girl" like she was another of Hollywood's party girls out for no good (unfortunately, this is not the last of Wilson's accusation). Secondly, sensitivity issues aside, it is completely off to state Logan was raped, because it's just coming out that rape may not have been part of the sexual assault, despite how the euphemism frequently covers that awful crime. Wilson's headline alone shows shallow reporting and sensationalism for the sole purpose of grabbing attention on the basis that bad news sells. And looking into her other headlines, Logan wasn't the only victim of Wilson's feeble attempt at sensitivity--"City of Bell E-Mail Fun: Officials Called Themselves Fat Pigs, LOLed," "One 'Gate' Too Many: L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar Devoured Alive by Opponent Rudy Martinez, LA Times, Gleeful Citywatchers" and "L.A. Homeless Count Gets Off to Morbid Start: Dead Guy Found Outside Criminal Court" also grace her author page. There's also a very strange fascination with subject's physical appearances, including "South Gate Man With Dragon Tattoo Kills 10-Month-Old Baby Daughter" and "LAPD Officers Kill Man Wearing Only Boxers In Playa Vista," as though there should be a warning against people wearing only boxers and exposing their dragon tattoos (Lisbeth Salander, cover yourself up lay and off the Marky Marks if you ever visit LA).

As if Wilson's headline wasn't, er, truthful enough, her background description of Logan as "known for her shocking good looks and ballsy knack for pushing her way to the heart of the action, was brutally and repeatedly raped while a crowd of 200 celebrated..." Like Wilson's strange headlines earlier sampled, there is no earthly reason why someone's physical appearance should make any difference in the overall story or have any effect on Logan's reporting. The fact that these two tidbits, which Wilson apparently sees as important samplings of Logan's personality, come just before the first mention of Logan's assault, with extreme wording and inappropriately in bold font no less, only leads me to think Wilson believed Logan deserved her assault from her envelope-pushing reporting and good looks combined.

The single photo of Lara Logan supplied in the piece is also troubling and only adds to the strange, almost perverse fascination Wilson has with Logan's good looks. While most other news sites have used pretty de-glamoured pictures of Logan, including some of her in the heart of combat or profiled from the neck-up, Wilson apparently believed the only accurate portrayal of Logan was one in a low-cut dress (taken from the Gracie Allen Awards). Is this the kind of anti-feminist thinking that any woman would want to have thought of her? Wear a low-cut dress and you're asking to be sexually assaulted? That you deserve to be? Ms. Wilson, you don't do that for the same reason you don't have a headline reading, "21-Year-Old Wyoming Student Found Brutally Tortured, Killed" and feature only a picture of Matthew Shephard kissing a gay lover--because you never, ever want to think anyone with, for lack of a better phrase, a socially different outlook having a horrible hate crime done to them deserved it at all or they had it coming to them based solely on how society judges them. This kind of thinking can only reveal a hideously old-fashioned, out-of-touch personality. People are people and any hate crime, from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to murder should not be tolerated or thought to be deserved, and adding embellishments leading one to think otherwise is completely tasteless.

Wilson's "reporting" on how Logan was attacked is about as heinous as the crime itself:


Logan was in Tahrir Square with her "60 Minutes" news team when Mubarak's announcement broke. Then, in a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protesters apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter.

Did Wilson think she was writing a Jack London novella when she chose her words? If I am ever sexually assaulted, I pray to a God I don't believe in that nobody uses the phrase "a rush of frenzied excitement" to describe how my attackers went after me as though a man forcing himself on a woman should be given the same titillating description of a Michael Bay movie. Then there's the question of the word "apparently," which is thrown around callously to describe the Egyptian protester's reasoning for assaulting Logan. Nobody even knows if it was exactly the protesters who attacked Logan, erroneously referred to as "blonde reporter" this time by Wilson (Two questions: First, is Ms. Wilson at all related to the Janitor from Scrubs, and two, should we include "blonde" in the pantheon of Physical Traits To Get You [Justifiably] Attacked According to Simone Wilson?), and despite the gravity of this crime and my hope that Logan's attackers be brought to justice, it's far too early and there are too few details to instigate this name-calling.


Thirty-nine-year-old Logan has long attacked Hollywood-lite reporters for their dumbing down of overseas violence -- at the same time using her Hollywood good looks and spotlight to push a more hard-hitting agenda.

And what about a blogger who exploits other people's tragedies (and erroneously underlines her subject's ages) in order to get more hits for her pieces? Logan's desire to "push a more hard-hitting agenda" stems from not seeing war covered the way it should be and having government interference censoring her--which, frankly, is just a woman wanting to do her job. Of course Ms. Wilson wouldn't know that, not being a real reporter and all...


But Wilson's most unforgiving mention comes in the form of bringing up Logan's personal relationships, of all places shortly after quoting MoFo Politics with this morsel of poetic wisdom: "OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so? I would totally rape her."

Although one could argue that Wilson's self-referential style is just a way of showing other medium's reactions, the syntax of her piece is as poorly placed as an American Airlines ad during a commercial break from the pilot episode of Lost. A person's romantic/sexual relations have absolutely no place in an article primarily concerning said woman's sexual attack, and certainly not after the quote from someone who believes rape to be acceptable as long as there are no sanctions. "Nobody's invincible" proclaims Wilson, yet numerous times in her pieces she demonstrates that while nobody is invincible, some are less invincible than others.

The backlash of Wilson's article, posted yesterday (February 15, 2011), was enough to warrant a follow-up comment and a feeble attempt at an apology, though even this is laden with more accusations than genuine remorse; mostly her additional comments make snide remarks to other pieces which attacked her own original article, including the good people at Salon.com, whose article about the pointedly sexist backlash against Logan's attack heavily quoted Wilson's original article, and rightly so. Wilson's counterattack was this: "Salon.com, apparently looking for its own hard-hitting approach to the day's biggest story, did choose to take that angle -- meanwhile reprinting about half our story on its own pages (enough said) -- but that was another blogger's choice."

That's the second time she's used the word "apparently" with such utter callousness, and this time it's just undeserved. While Salon.com might not be hard-hitting when it comes to the news, it certainly has more dignity and journalistic integrity in one article than Simone Wilson can ever hope to imagine in her entire life. It's also downright hypocritical for Wilson to criticize Salon.com's article for "reprinting half our story on its own pages;" While author Mary Elizabeth Williams certainly quoted Wilson's article for journalistic purposes, it certainly wasn't half the article. And you know what? Williams' quoting was fucking basic good criticism and journalism which anyone in an AP English class could grasp. Wilson might want to take a few notes from Williams' article, since her own leans heavily on excerpts from Esquire, The New York Post, and MoFo Politics--and of all those, only a brief mention from an LA Times blogger actually mentions Logan's brilliance in her career instead of her personal relations.

Lara Logan has a long emotional recovery ahead of her, and I sincerely doubt she would have wanted her own tragedy exploited for the agendas of victim's fault or anti-Egyptian sentiments. She deserves far, far more from her peers than to be derided as "blonde journalist," and deserves a sincere, goddamn apology from Simone Wilson, who still cannot stop ridiculing Logan's good looks, as evidenced here: "...hopefully well on her way back to fighting the good fight for truth, journalism and girls who happen to fall on the gorgeous side of the fight for truthful journalism."

Whatever issues Wilson may have with her self-esteem (was she teased by a blonde bully from Journalism class in high school?), it's no excuse for her callous words. Logan put her life on the line to go to Egypt so the world could get a story, and so hateful women like Simone Wilson could write sensationalized follow-ups to it behind the safety of her computer screen. She's a disgrace to the importance of the written word as well as womanhood and she is not, nor will she ever be a truthful journalist, and she should follow in Nin Rosen and Mubarek's footsteps and resign from her post; There is, apparently, no tact left in journalism.


You can read Wilson's original article as well as Salon.com's rebuttal below:

Simone Wilson: http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/02/lara_logan_raped_egypt_reporte.php

Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/index.html?story=/ent/tv/feature/2011/02/15/lara_logan_rape_reaction

You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

The tragedy in every relationship lies in the short (emotional) distance between the rushed high of first love and the cold turkey withdrawal at its end. Director Derek Cianfrance understands this all too well, and as a result his feature debut film Blue Valentine is framed in two narrative threads braided over each other; the first depicts how working-class twenty-somethings Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) fell in love and became a family, and the second travels about six years down the road where they have hit the ground and pick up the pieces of their broken dreams, their quivering despair at what their love has become. Like the popular (500) Days of Summer, Valentine is presented out of chronological order--sort of. The two time periods (the couple's courting shot with a free-wheeling, hand-held 16mm, the frozen present scenes are shot digitally and as static as the emotions it captures) are technically sequential but cut back and forth. Some have complained that the lack of a middle hurts the overall emotional wallop of the film by not showing exactly how or why the relationship went sour, but I think it works because like Marc Webb's considerably lighter film, it understands how memory works, that when a relationship wilts we first want to go back to the beginning when the heaps of happiness overwhelmed us. When my ex told me (quite abruptly) he wanted to slow things down, nearly every day for months, even after we more or less sutured back together, I would spend some time looking over our old instant-messaging when there were only the sweetest promises and the kindest terms of endearment, and I would wonder, "Where the hell did the man I love go and who is this person who's hurting me so much?"

But no matter what one thinks of the film's off-kilter narrative, the acting is almost too painfully real to watch. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are two of our generation's most talented actors who have shown time and time again their willingness to explore the dark pockets of the human soul (for further proof of their talents and their maturity from teenage drivel to adult actors to be reckoned with, see Half Nelson and Wendy and Lucy). Both actors were attached to the script for years before it finally got off the ground (both receive an executive producer's credit), and it's impossible to think of anyone else in the roles. Cianfrance's way of extracting their very palpable chemistry goes far beyond Method acting; during the filming hiatus between the two narratives, Cianfrance had Williams and Gosling living together in a rented house, buy groceries, pick fights and then go play with the child actress portraying their daughter. Given both the emotional and physical dimensions of their chemistry, I would not at all be surprised if they had a brief affair at Cianfrance's suggestion. Williams has even compared the making of the film to being on the life-taking machine from The Princess Bride--and that's painful just to think about.

 If there is one flaw in the movie, it's the complete discontinuity between the young Dean and the older Dean. Now, I know I made a case how the black and white states of being in love and falling out of love worked for the film's narrative, but the disbelief worked to the advantage of the emotions, whereas the acting just made me think there two different actors a la That Obscure Object of Desire. I don't want to place too much fault on Ryan Gosling since he technically does both believably well, but he goes so far in the opposite direction when portraying older Dean that he becomes unlikable in the process, which is heartbreaking considering how the young Dean's easy-going charisma is like an indie version of Lloyd Dobler. The fact that he's given glasses to shade his eyes and seems to have taken notes from Stanley Tucci's unbearably loud performance as the child murderer in The Lovely Bone doesn't help matters, either. Strangely, the "present" Dean bears a striking resemblance to director Derek Cianfrance, and it makes me believe that Cianfrance put all of his emotional turmoil into this character that he didn't once ask his actor alter ego to hold anything back, and it hurts Gosling's performance in the process.

It's shown in subtle ways that both Cindy and Dean come from broken families--Dean's mom left the family and Cindy's parents have lost whatever love they once had to the point of regular violent outbursts. Both have dealt with this in very different ways, and although the film doesn't underline any one reason, it's clear that these issues will contribute to their eventual separation. Dean's masculine prowess makes him lash out out of both love and the fear of losing it. Cindy, on the other hand, has seen much abuse and cowers away at the love she so desperately wants in favor of meaningless sex with undeserving men. She doesn't know how to speak her mind, nor what a healthy relationship would feel like if it fell upon her like a bag of bricks. When they first meet, Dean supplies Cindy with the affection she wants and deserves, and their happiness is insurmountable.

But nothing, not even happiness lasts very long as Celia Johnson once lamented. No, eventually their unspoken frailties eventually, inevitably crack their hasty attempt to become a family. Their inability to understand themselves and their self-worth plays a huge part in their self-betrayal and hatred of each other. When Anais Nin, an expert on the complex dance between eroticism and emotions, once wrote this morsel of broken-heart wisdom, she could've been referring to the disillusion of Cindy and Dean's relationship, and indeed all relationships which bite the dust with nothing but the passing of time: "Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."