CBS’s Logan Visits Kirkland

CBS News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan visited Kirkland House on Friday afternoon for an intimate talk about her decades-long career as a journalist.

The event, hosted in the Kirkland Masters’ residence, is part of the House’s speaker-series, “Conversations with Kirkland.”

Logan, who is currently a correspondent for 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, focused on several events in her life that she said have shaped the way she reports.

The South African-born journalist stressed the importance of her upbringing during the apartheid era, comparing the period to the time during the American Constitution’s formation.

“I saw what it really means to fight for democracy,” she said. “The lessons were so bloody.”

Logan began writing for the Sunday Tribune, a South Africa-based paper, at the age of 17. In 1992, she began her career in TV journalism as a senior producer for Reuters Television.

But Logan spoke candidly about aspects of reporting for television that she said still concern her.

“The great challenge of TV reporting is to take the full scope of an event and condense it,” Lara reflected. “The simplest [sic] you make a story the less you know, and that’s worthless to me.”

As a reporter during conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Logan said that she has had to balance being a woman with her professional responsibilities.

She recounted a time when her hotel was bombed and before going on air Logan, who repeatedly called herself “feminine,” said that she took the time to put on makeup and clothing appropriate for reporting from an Arabic nation.

“I’ve never been to war without lipgloss,” she said.

About halfway through the event, the conversation veered away from war reporting to a discussion about the complications of attractiveness in the journalism business. In a Washington Post profile last year, Logan, who recently re-married in Nov. 2008, complained that her life was being reduced to “tabloid fodder.” And at Kirkland on Friday, she acknowledged that while she has attracted undue attention because of her blonde hair and good looks, she wants to be judged based on the quality of her work.

“Being a journalist is an extension of what I believe,” she said.