Lara Logan, Once a Star at CBS News, Is Now One for the Far Right

She was never respected by those who worked with her.

“The moment I wasn’t toeing the line, then I was, ‘Oh, she used to be great, what happened to her?’” Logan said on a recent episode of Lindell’s web show, “The Lindell Report.”

“‘Oh, she’s unhinged and disgraced,’” Logan added, referring to the criticism and ostracism she has faced in recent months after making disparaging comments about public health officials like Fauci, among others.

In November, after she compared Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed inhumane experiments on concentration camp prisoners, Logan was dumped by the production company that made a show she starred in on Fox Nation, the streaming service for Fox News. Her longtime talent agency also severed ties with her, according to one news executive.

Since then, she has been relegated even further into the periphery of conservative media, where vaccine skeptics and election deniers host her and hail her as a whistleblower who, in their telling, is exposing mainstream media cover-ups. In interviews in recent weeks, she has taken aim at a range of seemingly unrelated targets — railing against “open border ideologues” and the United Nations bureaucrats she accuses of supporting them, so-called smart meters that record energy consumption in homes, and activists working to reverse climate change, which she has called “another load of B.S.”

Although she expresses views that are hard right today, some former CBS News colleagues recalled that her politics were not always easy to pigeonhole as conservative when they worked together. One said that Logan, who was raised in South Africa, once expressed dismay at the prevalence of guns in the United States and said she did not understand the affinity that many Americans have for the Second Amendment. She spoke with pride about her family when she described them as dedicated opponents of apartheid, they said.

Several who worked alongside her said her fearlessness in war zones was double-edged — it produced some good television but also sometimes made them question her judgment. On occasion, they said, she led her producers and crew into situations that they thought were not worth the risk. Some cameramen refused to work with her, one of the former colleagues added, and she could be dismissive of the security teams the network hired to keep its journalists safe.

One former CBS producer who worked with her, Peter Klein, said in an interview that the structure of a large newsroom was a moderating influence. “There’s a system in place in newsrooms that offer checks and balances,” said Klein, founder of the Global Reporting Centre in British Columbia, a nonprofit. “Most of us need that system — but she really needed that system. And we knew that from the beginning,” he said.

“Now she’s just unfiltered,” Klein added.

The former CBS journalists said that spending more than a decade reporting from war zones started to take its toll on her emotionally, as it would on almost anyone repeatedly subjected to the trauma of combat. And they said they noticed a considerable change in her demeanor — seemingly more paranoid at times, erratic and deferential to her military sources — after she was sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. In that attack, a mob of men grabbed her, separated her from her crew and tore off her clothes in what she described as a “merciless” attack. She was hospitalized for several days.

The next year, Logan gave a speech that would presage her downfall at CBS. The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had just been attacked, killing four Americans and igniting a firestorm among Republicans who accused Obama and Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, of underestimating the threat terrorists posed to Americans.

Then, about a year later, she began telling people she was working on a story that “was going to blow the lid off Benghazi,” according to one person’s recollection.

The story she came up with was the kind of work known inside “60 Minutes” somewhat dismissively as a “book report” because it was based in part on a forthcoming book. Logan interviewed the author, a security contractor stationed in Libya, who said in a segment that aired on Oct. 27, 2013, that he had helped defend the compound on the night of the attack. He described in harrowing detail how he came face to face with the enemy.

The New York Times reported several weeks later that the contractor had, in fact, told the FBI that he was not inside the compound that night. After initially defending Logan and the report, CBS News retracted it and apologized. Logan and her producer were placed on a leave of absence, and she acknowledged having made a “disappointing” mistake.

The network’s chief and executive producer of “60 Minutes” at the time, Jeffrey Fager, later called the story “the worst mistake on my 10-year watch.”

Logan quietly left the network in 2018 after her contract expired. In a defamation lawsuit she filed in 2019 against New York magazine over a 2014 profile she claimed had harmed her ability to find other work, she said CBS cut her salary to $750,000 in 2015 from $2.15 million in 2014. (A federal judge dismissed the case.) She moved from Washington to the Hill Country of Texas with her husband and children, a relocation she told People magazine in 2016 allowed her to focus more on being a mother, especially to her son with a learning disability.

Logan’s banishment from mainstream media has hardly restricted her access to the center of gravity in the Republican Party.

This month, she made a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, for a screening of a new film by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. Other guests included Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Kyle Rittenhouse, the man acquitted of murdering two people during a political demonstration that turned violent in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. As guests mingled on the grounds, Rittenhouse stopped to have his picture taken with Logan.

Wasn't it Ann Coulter who said a liberal is just a conservative who hasn't been robbed (in this case, raped) yet?

Her face is busted too.

Lara Logan sued NY Magazine but the lawsuit was tossed out. It is difficult to win when the article features the truth.

What amazes me is that several of her biggest advocates (Les Moonves, etc.) were "impacted" by the Me Too movement.

Lara comes across as beyond vile, and can best be described as the Amber Heard of the news world.

she is despicable trash.

I've noticed some other previously well-regarded journalists became insane during the Obama years and never rejoined reality.

Another one is that idiot Adam Housley who is married to actress Tamara Mowry. Housley and Logan are longtime friends and I've been unfortunate enough to sometimes encounter their tweets hyping each other up with right wing bullshit propaganda

[quote] Lara comes across as beyond vile, and can best be described as the Amber Heard of the news world.

YES! Exactly.

Apparently, "Touched By Arabs" made this bitch totally crazy.

So is Lara Logan's right-wing views rooted in her South African upbringing?

I honestly thought she was a decent reporter, prior to her swing to the right.

But as the article points out, it was probably thanks to CBS.

Once the "reins" were off, her full on crazy came out.

[quote] Apparently, "Touched By Arabs" made this bitch totally crazy.

That's her own damned fault.

The article points out that she always dismissed security precautions, so she paid the price for her own stupidity.

Reckless. Crazy. Famous.

Classic NYTimes: wait til well into the article to mention Logan's role in platforming a grifting liar to push right wing bullshit about Benghazi.

And pass it off as a mistake when it was in fact a gross departure from basic journalistic ethics motivated by her own political motives.

And completely leave out the fact that her husband had worked for the Pentagon in the very specific role of pushing masked pro-Iraq War propaganda in the media.

[quote]While Davies was the central on-camera personality in that report, the most interesting figure in this mystery was never on screen, nor listed as a contributor to the piece. It is Logan's husband, Joseph W. Burkett, a former Army sergeant and onetime employee of a private intelligence outfit hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005. One recent account implied that Burkett, 42, was the Svengali behind the now infamous story that pinned responsibility for the Benghazi attack on al Qaeda, without citing any sources.

[quote]"He was an employee of the Lincoln Group, a now-shuttered 'strategic communications and public relations firm' hired by the Department of Defense in 2005 to plant positive stories written by American soldiers in Baghdad newspapers during the Iraq War," the website Gawker reported. The Gawker account also implied Burkett was a key operator in the covert action. A source intimately familiar with Burkett's family told Newsweek that he regularly suggested he was some sort of super-spook.

[quote]According to an internal company document obtained by Newsweek, the Lincoln Group specialized in producing films, news clips, and print stories in Baghdad that would be fed to the media through cutouts on an unattributed basis, making them appear as originating from legitimate news organizations.

She's a right wing media "star" precisely because they don't give a shit about ethics, accuracy, or integrity.

She really needs to lay off all that Restylane, it’s going to her head!

Right winger or not, you know you've hit the rock bottom when you appear on Mike Lindell's show.

[quote] Right winger or not, you know you've hit the rock bottom when you appear on Mike Lindell's show.

No respectable media outlet will have her on their show.

She's been cancelled. For good reason.

But why only her? Why not Tucker Carlson? Or all the other right-wing nutters?

They all deserve to be fucking cancelled.

R15 when even Fox canceled her, you know she's deep in shit. Even they couldn't accept her comparing Fauci to the nazi doctor.

I remember her on CBS. To me, this is huge. She came across as a normal person. Perhaps this [italic]does[/italic] have something to do with the assault and no ramifications for the perpetrators.

she was fucking some hot guy in iraq.

[quote] Logan’s turn has disappointed many who considered her bright and fearless and admired her for returning again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan despite nearly losing her life in 2003, when a U.S. military vehicle she was in was hit by Taliban fire. She lay unconscious while her crew and military personnel scrambled to drag her to safety, thinking she was dead.

[quote] “She was extraordinarily courageous in her war reporting,” said Ira Rosen, a former “60 Minutes” producer who wrote a book about his years with the network, “Ticking Clock.”

[quote] “When I think of Lara,” Rosen added, “I want to remember the Lara who put her life on the line reporting for CBS News in Afghanistan and Egypt. The one now I almost don’t even want to know about.”

Sounds like she may even have suffered from CTE traumatic brain injury, which may have altered her personality.

Football players experience this all the time, and it turns them into completely different people.

Or she was always this way (as some in the article have hinted), and she's just "coming out of the closet," so to speak.

The assault might have further radicalized her, but she was already problematic. She went after Michael Hastings for reporting on how General McChrystal and his staff were trashing the Obama administration for not being as bloodthirsty as their predecessors. She actually criticized Hastings for not being more deferential to the military. Ironically, Hastings had some sympathy for McChrystal and was critical of the Obama administration's handling of the counterinsurgency. But Logan thinks reporters who are imbedded with the military have to be loyal to them. And then of course there was her failure to disclose her conflict of interest in her relationship with Burkett and his Pentagon ties.

She is beyond batshit crazy. She was even too crazy for Fox News.

Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton? Who's doing the bio pic guys?

Amber Heard

She was always a problematic presence within CBS News. Credit to her for her willingness to enter war zones (truly), but she got the job due to her looks.

She used to go over the heads of her bosses to Les Moonves… god knows what was going on there. And she was juggling a couple guys at once, presumably with no transparency to anyone others than her co-workers, who saw it all playing out.

Her veracity has always been in question.

R23 She looks like Naomi Watts.

[quote]Her veracity has always been in question.

What a cunt.

We should deport her ass to Egypt.

Let them deal with her.

R28, they've had sufficient.

Who cares , let this crazy ugly bitch fade into obscurity!

Some of us here wouldn't mind being groped by a swarthy, hot, frenzied young Arab on the street, but Lara is a bit more choosy (or so she claims).

I'm so tired of the bullshit excuse of what happened to her in Egypt being the reason she went crazy. She was a fucking mouthpiece for the bullshit war. So I guess she didn't mind when Iraqi citizens including kids were raped and burned to death along with their families by the US military. She promoted that fucking war and might as well have held pompoms for her reports covering the military.

Another immigrant Afrikaner who has added to the demise of the country.

[quote] Another immigrant Afrikaner who has added to the demise of the country.

She may be South African but clearly Logan isn’t an Afrikaans name.

She speaks cuntish.

Honey that must have been some girthy Iraq cock for her to risk her life for it!

The stuff she was saying was really bizarre and out there. I think she always had right wing sympathies but the trauma didn't help. It's complicated because the type of personality who goes into war reporting is already going to be " abnormal" by most people's standards to begin with.

You’re assuming the assault actually happened. That’s not totally clear.

Bumping this thread for the idiot who recreated this exact same thread.

Can we deport her back to South Africa?

We don't want her here in this country.

There are enough mentally ill MAGATS causing trouble.

Send her stupid ass back to where she came from!

I stopped watching 60 Minutes after her fabricated Benghazi hatchet job.

The disturbing thing to me is that the pentagon is outsourcing propaganda to private agencies, like the one Logan’s husband worked for. Why? We have the CIA and military intelligence for that. The guy was a sargeant. Since when are sergeants propaganda specialists? That’s officers work.

Why wasn’t the CIA charged with doing this work, which they’ve done for the past 70 years?. Foreign correspondents worked for foreign news bureaus which were always run by CIA/OSS. The London bureau of The NY Times, the Hong Kong bureau of the Washington Post….all were bona fide intelligence agents, usually with an Ivy League or Little Ivy degree.

Now places spring up called Lincoln Group made up of motley soldiers for hire and they’re our propaganda specialists? Sounds easy to infiltrate. And makes me even more suspicious of the Lincoln Project.

R4 She is right. A lot of people are liberal until they grow up and understand things generally stay the same and by then they are tired of crime and the like. They say when you are young and have a heart you are liberal but when you grow up and gain a brain, you turn conservative. I hate the repugs but I am sick of crime in this country. I dont know if republicans can make it better. I know how underhanded and despicable they are but I feel that way about the democrats too. Idk. I would not label myself republican but I am more conservative leaning these days.

"I'VE GOT MINE, FUCK YOU"

Conservatives have very little empathy for their fellow man or woman.

It's all that "Egyptian cock,balls and cum" that drove Lara over the quivering pussy edge, made her fucking nuts!!

I never liked her. She was always a shitty person. And her voice is horrible.

Now all she does is go on and on and on and on about cancel culture

The world would be a better place without her in it

This is actually kind of sad. It seems like at one point she was a great and brave, though yes clearly reckless, war correspondent. That story of her doing everything to get into Iraq for the start of the war shows her to be a really tenacious and courageous journalist. But clearly she has a screw loose and probably always did. Wish she'd been able to stay in her lane, with a strong producer or editor or whatever to keep her from giving in to the crazy. Now I guess she's just another wingnut blathering Trumpista bullshit over all the place, which is actually pretty sad.

Given her current friends and allies, I do wonder if she was always an Afrikaaner racist, and maybe "revised" her family background to include some mythical anti-apartheid views.

Her photo needs to be under the definition of 'resting bitch face'.