Whatever Happened To 60 Minutes Correspondent Lara Logan?
Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual assault.
CBS's "60 Minutes" has had its fair share of iconic hosts and correspondents throughout the program's 54 years on the air. Some of them, like Connie Chung, went on to grow their careers in other outlets, whereas others — like Steve Kroft — stayed on the show for long decades and became synonymous with the "60 Minutes" brand. Another prominent example of the latter would be Leslie Stahl, who's worked on the show for over three decades now. However, not all of the journalists who were part of the "60 Minutes" crew managed to avoid controversy throughout their careers post-CBS.
Lara Logan, once the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS's flagship news program, left the station in 2018. Her 12-year stint at "60 Minutes" was a memorable one, mainly because of her courageous coverage of international conflicts and pivotal events directly from the heart of the action. In 2011, she was violently sexually assaulted while covering the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, and her testimony of the experience sent shockwaves across the United States and the entire world (via LA Times). The South African journalist left CBS in 2018 and became vocal in her criticism of mainstream news outlets.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
Logan joined Fox News in 2020
Lara Logan's CBS career was hanging by a thread after she delivered a controversial, inaccurate report on the 2012 Benghazi attack (via CNN). As a result of this coverage, she was forced to take a prolonged leave of absence from working at the station (via The Washington Post). She remained an employee of the station for the next couple of years, but her role was radically limited. Logan parted ways with CBS in 2018, but the news of her departure only broke in early 2019 (via Variety).
Following her split with CBS, the journalist was quickly contracted by Fox News. On top of guest appearances in various primetime talk shows, she was put in charge of her own docuseries, "Lara Logan Has No Agenda," which was released on Fox Nation (via Fox News). Despite the rather explicit message conveyed in the show's title, Logan's docuseries was resemblant of typical Fox coverage and revolved mainly around the topics of immigration, veterans, and the criticism of other media outlets.
Throughout her time at Fox Nation, viewers could observe the acclaimed journalist's descent down into the conspiracy theory territory, and ultimately, her controversial statements proved to be too much for Fox, which silently dropped her show in late 2021. The breaking point came in November of that year, when she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele, the physician responsible for horrendous human experiments during World War II (via The Guardian).
She was dropped from Newsmax in 2022
Following her ousting from Fox News, Lara Logan began seeking out opportunities in news outlets that skewed even further to the right. One such outlet was Newsmax, a far-right-leaning cable news channel that has received mainstream attention for legitimizing the election fraud conspiracy theory pertaining to the 2020 election (via Vox). For a while, it seemed like Logan had found a new home for herself after being ousted from America's most popular conservative TV station. However, despite the channel's proclivity for extreme talking points and far-fetched conspiracies, the former "60 Minutes" correspondent didn't last on the network.
The far-right cable news channel cut all ties with Logan following her rant on the subject of the U.S.-Mexico border. Although the journalist's statements are unavailable on the Newsmax YouTube channel or website, other outlets were quick to extract quotations from Logan's shocking tirade. Among other things, she claimed that God "knows that the open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world through all these people who are his stooges and servants ... You know, the ones who want us eating insects [and] cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children?" (via The Hill).
After leaving Newsmax, Logan went on to co-write "Selection Code," a 2022 conspiratorial documentary that was funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell (via Mother Jones). The documentary — which was Logan's most recent project — covered the so-called "evidence" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.