Lara Logan: Why ordinary people still give her hope

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

A few weeks after walking out of a Colorado prison, Tina Peters will take the stage at RMV Freedom Fest.

Lara Logan will follow her to the microphone.

After decades covering wars, terrorism, government corruption and some of the biggest stories in the world, Logan still talks most about people like Peters.

A county clerk. A whistleblower. A parent standing before a school board. An ordinary person who decides staying quiet is no longer an option.

“People like Tina Peters … she was just a mom,” Logan said.

Logan is no stranger to the state. Over the past several years, Colorado has kept showing up in her reporting through Tina Peters’ case and the election-integrity disputes that followed.

For Logan, Peters’ story fit a pattern she sees repeatedly in her reporting: ordinary people finding themselves in fights they never expected to have.

“Colorado was not always a blue state. It didn’t turn very long ago, and for a long time it was a red state, a stronghold.”

“The politics of those in power doesn’t reflect the politics of many of the people you meet there.”

“It really bothers me when things are not honest… If you don’t challenge these operations, these narratives take root, and they begin to destroy.” 

But the roots of her worldview stretch back much farther than Colorado.

Logan was 17 when she started reporting in South Africa during the apartheid era.

“We lived under emergency restrictions because of apartheid, which was a system of racial division, and I hated apartheid,” she said. “I couldn’t bear racism. I knew instinctively that it was wrong.”

She remembers a country where even language was controlled.

The government had banned Nelson Mandela. The government controlled not only the message but who was allowed to deliver it.

“You could go to jail if you said his name, but they could say his name any time they wanted to trash him in the papers.” 

That experience left her with a different understanding of what people were fighting for.

“People in South Africa were fighting for color not to matter, for everybody to be treated the same … for your race not to be your defining characteristic, to be treated on your merits,” she said.

Long before television, war zones or 60 Minutes, Logan already knew what she wanted to do.

“I was born to be a journalist,” she said. “That’s all I’ve ever been. That’s all I ever wanted to be.”

For a brief time she did international aid work and hated it. 

She recalled people walking for days seeking medical treatment after surviving conflict. “And they get there at 5:20, and you’re telling them you closed at 5:00 so that you can go and sit in your room, have dinner or do whatever it is, and you just close the door on these people?”

“It means you don’t care,” she said. “It means you’re not who you say you are. It means you’re a lie.”

The places changed. The test never did. It eventually carried her from South Africa to Iraq, Afghanistan and some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. It also helped make her one of television’s best-known foreign correspondents through CBS News and 60 Minutes.

Today she works independently through her platform, Going Rogue with Lara Logan.

Logan doesn’t describe leaving network news as a decision she made.

“I didn’t do it through choice. I was forced into it… I was one of the early victims of cancel culture.”

Logan has watched people give up careers and reputations for what they believed, expecting it to be made right. It often isn’t.

“They have a right to expect redemption. They do. But I’ve never had redemption, you know?” 

“I have learned that you don’t always get redemption when you do the right thing.”

None of it altered her view of the work itself.

Logan said she never abandoned the reporting standards she learned in network news. She still believes in firsthand sources, verification and following facts wherever they lead.

“I didn’t unlearn anything because the principles that we worked by were sound.”

Logan said she never abandoned the standards she learned in network news. Going independent changed everything around the work. It didn’t change how she does it.

“I didn’t unlearn anything because the principles that we worked by were sound,” she said. “Always wanting first-hand sources, at least two if possible. Only using anonymity when there’s real risk to the person, not hiding behind anonymity to push a false narrative.”

The line she draws is between doing the work and arguing a side.

“We’re not lawyers in a court of law. We’re not cherry-picking evidence to make a case, and we’re not activists,” she said. “We don’t pick and choose what makes our cause attractive. We’re journalists.”

What changed, she said, were the institutions around those principles.

“The only thing legacy media misses is the truth.”

Asked when her attention shifted toward election integrity, Logan doesn’t point to a report or court case.

She points to election night.

“When they stopped counting on election night. We’d never seen that,” she said. “They never stopped counting on election night before, and in all the swing states.”

What followed, she said, was just as important as the pause itself.

The questions she expected journalists to ask never seemed to come.

“And then lo and behold, no one asked, why are they not counting? Why did they stop?” 

Logan said she began pulling on a thread she believed many news organizations had little interest in following. Her recent work runs heavily to whistleblowers—people inside a system, or close to it, who think no one is being held to account.

Ask her what a young investigative team should do and she doesn’t reach for tradecraft.

“Be bold,” she said.

“Don’t be afraid.”

“Don’t walk away from anything, from any injustice.”

She argued that fear changes people. It causes them to stay silent, walk away or settle for easier answers. 

“God tells us not to live in fear and not to make our decisions out of fear.”

For all the criticism, controversy and professional battles she has endured over the years, when asked what still gives her hope, Logan didn’t point to a politician, a court case or a movement.

“It gives me hope that more people today realize, and recognize, and understand and see the truth,” she said.

What she expects to be asked one day has nothing to do with television ratings, awards or the stories that made her famous.

“When I go before God, what he’s gonna ask me about is, do your children know me?”

She’ll speak at RMV Freedom Fest at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock on June 26.