Foreign correspondent Lara Logan has left CBS News
Foreign correspondent Lara Logan, once a rising star at CBS News with her war reporting, quietly exited the network last year.
Logan, whose reporting was mostly seen on “60 Minutes” in recent years, left after her last contract with the network ended in 2018, a CBS News representative confirmed. Her departure went largely unnoticed until she appeared Monday in an interview cited by right-wing website Breitbart News.
In the interview, which got online attention, she agreed with podcast host and retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland’s description of the U.S. news media as “absurdly left-leaning” and a “disaster for this country.”
“The media is mostly liberal everywhere, not just the U.S.,” Logan added. “We’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.”
Logan said that the issue for her was one of balance and that if the politics of the media were reversed “that would also be a problem for me.” Still she characterized her own remarks as “career suicide.”
CBS News had no comment on Logan’s interview, which was used by Breitbart and other right-wing outlets and commentators to bolster their narrative that the mainstream media have a liberal bias in their reporting.
Logan, a native of South Africa, became a fixture of CBS News’ international coverage starting in 2002 when she became a correspondent. She developed a reputation for her fearlessness, reporting from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan while embedded with U.S. forces.
Logan was sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square while reporting the celebration of the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. She discussed the incident on “60 Minutes” three months later.
Logan was put on a leave of absence in 2013 after CBS News determined she made serious errors in a report on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans died. Logan and her executive producer had failed to vet the comments of a defense contractor, whose account of the attack was later discredited.
Logan apologized for the error but appeared less frequently on “60 Minutes” after the controversy. Her final piece on the newsmagazine aired in May.
Twitter: @SteveBattaglio
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