Lara Logan's Fox Nation gig is the most conservative turn of her career so far, but politics have cast a long shadow over her work
Ashley Collman  Â
- Lara Logan recently drummed up controversy for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to an infamous Nazi doctor in an appearance on Fox News.
- For 16 years, Logan made a name for herself as a war correspondent at CBS.
Lara Logan, the South African-born journalist who made a name for herself covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, recently sparked controversy by comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners.
Source: Business Insider
Logan experienced a meteoric rise at CBS in the 2000s and early 2010s, before an inaccurate story tainted her image. She left the network in 2018, and two years later started hosting a show on Fox News' streaming service, Fox Nation.
Logan got her start in journalism at Reuters Television in Africa, where she worked a senior producer from 1992-1996, according to an old biography on the CBS News website.
That bio has since been deleted, but Insider was able to view an archived version.
Her work started to attract attention after she moved to London in the mid-1990s, first as a stringer for CNN during the conflict in the Balkans, and later for breakfast show GMTV, as Joe Hagan detailed in a 2014 profile of Logan for New York Magazine.
Logan sued Hagan over the New York Magazine story, saying it derailed her career, but the suit was was thrown out in 2020, according to Women's Wear Daily.
Logan was working at GMTV on 9/11 and convinced her bosses to let her travel to Kabul to report on the invasion of Afghanistan, Hagan reported for New York Magazine.
Source: New York Magazine
Logan's reports from Kabul led to a bidding war as news networks fought to hire a "captivating beauty with a smoldering presence in the war zone," Hagan wrote. Logan ended up taking a job at CBS, where she landed a $1 million full-time contract.
Source: New York Magazine
During her 16 years at CBS, Logan made a name for herself by reporting from the frontlines, including securing interviews with major military figures.
But her connections in the military sometimes blurred the lines of professionalism. During the Iraq War, she started dating her current husband, who worked for a firm hired by the government to push pro-military stories, New York Magazine reported.
Source: New York Magazine
Logan made headlines herself while covering the ousting of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Logan became separated from her crew, after which she said she was raped by a mob of men.
Logan later spoke about the experience for CBS News:
It was around this time that Logan first started overtly expressing her political views, including criticizing a fellow reporter whose profile of a general resulted in that official's firing, New York Magazine reported.
In June 2010, then-President Obama relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal from his position as the top US commander in Afghanistan after Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings published an article including disparaging remarks the general made about the president and his national security team.
In an appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources, Logan speculated that Hastings published comments McChrystal made off the record, and therefore not meant for publishing. But Hastings told CNN during the same show that no ground rules were laid out for the story and he assumed his talks with McChrystal were on the record.
"Michael Hastings has never served his country the way Commander McChrystal has," Logan said.
Source: New York Magazine
Logan's politics weren't necessarily seen as a negative at CBS, according to Hagan, who wrote in New York Magazine that the correspondent "inoculated" the network against "charges of a leftist agenda."
Source: New York Magazine
Logan's career later imploded in 2013, when she was forced to apologize for inaccuracies in a "60 Minutes" story about the 2012 attack on the US governmental compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Logan scored an exclusive interview with a security contractor, Dylan Davies, who claimed to have responded to the attack at the government compound.
Logan's report presented "a narrative in which American authorities were perhaps cavalier about taking security concerns seriously in Benghazi," NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik said at the time.
But The New York Times soon revealed that Davies had mostly made up the story to sell a book for a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS' parent company.
Source: The New York Times
CBS put Logan and a producer, Max McClellan, on indefinite leave in late November 2013 following an internal review of the story, which found it to be "deficient in several respects," The Times reported.
Source: The New York Times
Logan quietly returned to work on "60 Minutes" seven months later, according to the The Hollywood Reporter.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Just as quietly as she returned to the network, Logan left CBS in 2018. Her exit wasn't revealed until February 2019, when a CBS spokesperson told Variety that Logan was no longer with the network and hadn't been for several months.
Source: Variety
Hagan wrote in his 2014 profile of Logan that CBS producers and crew members he spoke with didn't think of Logan as "particularly political," but that she "came to stories with strong biases" more typical in British media, where she got her start.
Source: New York Magazine
In the aftermath of Logan's comments on Fauci, one of her former producers, Peter Klein, wrote in an op-ed that Logan "tried to push the envelope sometimes" in his experience working with her, but he still found her to be a "good reporter."
Klein was a former producer of Logan's at "60 Minutes," and is now executive director of the Global Reporting Centre and a professor at the University of British Columbia.
"My phone and inbox have been overflowing with questions from friends, colleagues and strangers, asking if Lara was always this way. Let me set the record straight: no," Klein wrote in The Globe and Mail on December 3.
"It's true that Lara tried to push the envelope sometimes, but there's a system in place at reputable news organizations that keeps journalists in check," Klein added.
"The Lara I worked with was a good reporter. She was brave and curious, she listened during interviews and she knew how to tell a good story. While she did her share of pieces that glorified the US military, she was also open to critiques, as in our 2007 story Dissension in the Ranks, which looked at service members refusing to redeploy to Iraq over their concerns about how the war was being run by the Bush administration."
Upon leaving CBS News, Logan did a stint at the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, before debuting her Fox Nation show, "Lara Logan Has No Agenda," in January 2020.
On her Fox Nation show, Logan has produced episodes on the rise of socialism in America, the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, and privacy issues in Big Tech.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Times
She's also made regular guest appearances on Fox News, including subbing in for primetime host Tucker Carlson.
Even before her comments on Fauci, Logan's guest appearances on Fox News made headlines.
In her appearances on the network, Logan has suggested — without evidence — that communists may be behind attacks against white police officers; that the Biden administration is "hiding evidence" of COVID-19 vaccine side effects; and that someone may be using migrants to intentionally spread disease in the US.
Source: Fox News
The episode of Fox News Primetime where Logan made her comments about Fauci is unavailable online, and she hasn't appeared on the network since.
Neither Logan or Warm Springs Productions, which produces her Fox Nation show, returned Insider's requests for comment on Tuesday. Fox News did not immediately return a request for comment on why the November 29 episode of Fox News Primetime is not available online.
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