So I spent the weekend getting all worked up about the Lara Logan sex scandal. (Briefly: Newly promoted CBS national security correspondent had some romance in Iraq, with more than one man, gasp. One of the men was in the middle of a divorce, which started before their fling, but that didn’t seem to matter.) It completely eludes me how it’s at all newsworthy to write about the sex life of a reporter on assignment overseas. Would we ever read these stories about a male correspondent? Or, say, a slightly less blazing hot female journalist? (Logan is gorgeous and smart, which means she must be evil.) The scandal had strange timing, coming right after her promotion, and her pretty brilliant take-down of the media, including her employer, on the Daily Show.

I’ve spent the last 15 minutes trying to find anyone other than blog commenters spouting off about the fact that major media outlets — including the Huffington Post — actually gave real estate to this story and .. nada. Jack Shafer? Howard Kurtz wrote that the whole thing is “not much of a story.” But that’s all he had to say after dumping the whole shebang in quotes, straight from the New York Post. The fact that a liberalish news site like the Huffington Post, run by a woman even, ran the story with no filter of dismay or critique says a lot about the uneven playing field in journalism. All those boys on the mastheads don’t really have an incentive to go to bat for women like Logan. Kurtz could have said the coverage was irresponisble or hurtful, but he just dismissed it as girl stuff.