Lara Logan
Lara Logan (born March 29, 1971) is a television and radio journalist and war correspondent. She is currently the Chief Foreign Correspondent for CBS News, filing reports for the CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes and the CBS Radio Network.
Logan was born in Durban, South Africa. She attended high school at Durban Girls’ College, and then attended the University of Natal in Durban, graduating in 1992.
She is married to Jason Siemon, who was, until recently, a professional basketball player in the United Kingdom for the now-defunct Brighton Bears.
Logan has described how she begged a clerk at the Russian Embassy in London to give her an expedited visa days after the September 11, 2001 attacks. She then entered Afghanistan through southern Russia. In November 2001, Logan, then working as a correspondent for the British morning program, GMTV, managed to infiltrate the upper ranks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where she gained exclusive interviews at Bagram Air Base with General Babajan, a commander. Logan spent much of the next four years reporting from the field in Afghanistan, traveling often as an embedded reporter with American forces.
Named chief foreign correspondent of CBS News in February 2006, Logan was embedded with a U.S. military unit in Ramadi, Iraq on March 10, 2006, when a nearby Marine was shot by a sniper.
In late January 2007 Logan filed a report about fighting along Haifa Street. When CBS News refused to run the report on the nightly news because the footage was “a bit strong” (although the network did run the report on their internet site), Logan tried to win public support to reverse this decision. Logan stated that “I would be very grateful if any of you have a chance to watch this story and pass the link on to as many people you know as possible. It should be seen. And people should know about this.”
After making this public appeal, some bloggers and columnists made the claim that portions of Logan’s video report contains footage that is identical to footage released by al Qaeda. While this claim remains unsubstantiated (the ultimate source of the video has not been revealed by CBS News, or Logan, for reasons stated below), these individuals have nonetheless questioned Logan’s objectivity based on that premise. The explanation of where Logan got this footage was never addressed and the blanket accusation of the United States military being responsible is only substantiated by a resident wearing a headdress covering his face. Some right wing pundits feel this is agenda driven, anti American jounalism.
CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman said that the video was not from Al-Qaeda, although he declined to name the source. “Whenever we can identify the source of information or video, we want to do that,” he added. “There are some rare cases when we have to protect the source. In this case, we needed to do so, because it’s literally a matter of life and death.” CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius added that “The fact that same video shows up in more than one place is something that happens every day. We occasionally use video from an Al-Qaeda Web site and we identify it. In this case, we didn’t get it from Al-Qaeda, so we didn’t identify it as such.”
Logan went on to use some of the Haifa Street material in a 60 Minutes report about life in Baghdad under the surge.