What happened to Lara Logan? How the journalist went from respected war correspondent to right-wing radical

Lara Logan attends the 2013 TCA Winter Press Tour CW/CBS panel held at The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa on January 12, 2013 in Pasadena, California. — Lara Logan.
Photo by Tommaso Boddi/WireImage

Lara Logan has made headlines over controversial remarks.
For 16 years, Logan made a name for herself as a war correspondent at CBS News.
Her broadcast career crumbled after she started speaking more openly about her personal politics.

Lara Logan, the South African-born journalist who made a name for herself covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has been sparking controversy recently with her opinions on the COVID pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Here are a few of Logan's recent controversial comments:

Logan called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "some useful puppet that was installed by the CIA" during a March 8 appearance on His Glory TV's "Take Five," according to Media Matters for America.
MMFA also reposted a clip of Logan on Real America's Voice's "Cowboy Logic," saying that she believed the Capitol riot was a "manufactured event."
Logan appeared to question the validity of Darwinism during an appearance on the "And We Know" podcast on March 24, according to MMFA, by saying that Darwin was hired by the prominent Jewish Rothschild family to "come up with the theory." Many branded Logan's comments antisemitic.

Source: Business Insider

Perhaps her most talked-about scandal of late was comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading epidemiologist, to Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on Auschwitz prisoners.

Dr. Anthony Fauci raises right hand as he testifies at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. — Dr. Anthony Fauci is US President Joe Biden's chief medical officer.
Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images

Source: Business Insider

Her comments on Fauci in particular seemed to result in Fox News cutting ties with the journalist. While the network never issued a statement about Logan's comment, Logan admitted in March that she had been "dumped by Fox."

Logan made her comments about Fauci during an appearance on Fox News Primetime in November. The comments sparked widespread outrage and she hasn't been seen on the network since.

Logan had been making regular appearance on Fox shows, including filling in for Tucker Carlson on his primetime show.

She also was heading a series on Fox Nation, Fox News' streaming service. Since Logan's comments, no new episodes of her show, "Lara Logan Has No Agenda," have aired, but the old episodes are still up on Fox Nation's website.

During an appearance on retired Major General Paul Vallely's weekly talk show on March 28, Logan said she had been "dumped by Fox."

The Hollywood Reporter also learned after the Fauci comments that Logan had been dropped by her talent agency, UTA. A UTA representative told the outlet in January that it had cut ties with Logan several weeks prior.

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 as 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 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.

Lara Logan Joseph Burkett — Lara Logan and husband Joseph Burkett at the 2013 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty

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.

Egyptian anti-government protesters celebrate at Cairo's Tahrir Square after president Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11, 2011 — the same night Logan said she was raped by a mob while covering the news.
MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images

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.

Michael Hastings in 2012.
Jeff Neira/CBS via Getty Images

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

Then came what The Daily Beast described as a "provocative" speech at the annual lunch of the Better Government Association in 2012, where Logan criticized Obama's decision to ramp down the US military presence in the Middle East.

Source: The Daily Beast

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.

CBS headquarters in New York City in 2012.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

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."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks to members of the media at the National Institutes of Health October 24, 2014 in Bethesda, Maryland. — Dr. Anthony Fauci directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

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."

But Klein wrote that he saw a new version of Logan emerge two years ago, and he's watched as she's popped up occasionally to make "controversial comments that keep her relevant."

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 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

Even before her comments on Fauci, Logan's guest appearances on Fox News made headlines.

In 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.

In an April interview with conservative talk radio host Eric Metaxas, Logan talked about her exit from Fox News, saying she was "pushed out" from the network.

"No, I was definitely pushed out," Logan said. "I mean, there is no doubt about that. They don't want independent thinkers. They don't want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics."

Neither Logan or Warm Springs Productions, which produced her Fox Nation show, returned Insider's requests for comment in December when Insider first published this article.

Fox News did not return a request for comment on why the November 29 episode of Fox News Primetime is not available online.

Newsmax banned Logan after she went on a QAnon-style rant during an interview on the network.

On October 19, Logan touted QAnon-like conspiracy theories during a bizarre interview on the right-wing channel Newsmax.

"The open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants," she said during the interview with host Eric Bolling.

She added: "And they may think that they're going to become gods. That's what they tell us. … You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that, while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right?"

Two days later, the conservative news network put out a statement condemning Logan's on-air comments and said it has no plans to interview the former broadcast journalist again.

"Newsmax condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan and her views do not reflect our network," a network spokesperson said, per a CNN report. "We have no plans to interview her again."

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