latest news about Lara Logan

Should an attractive blonde have been sent to cover the demonstrations in Egypt?

CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan, 39, the mother of two young children, was surrounded by a 200-strong mob, suffered a brutal attack and was taken to hospital.

Some reports stated she was raped. The inevitable ‘she brought it on herself’ backlash was swift. Debbie Schlussel, a political columnist, wrote in a blog: ‘So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows . . .’

A male New York university fellow, who has since resigned, twittered that she was ‘probably just groped like thousands of other women’ (which doesn’t make it right. In countries such as Pakistan, sexual harassment is known as ‘Eve teasing’ and used to keep women indoors).

Backlash: Like most women who compete with men, Lara Logan too has used her womanly wiles to get ahead

In the late Eighties I worked on a women’s glossy with Janine di Giovanni, an award-winning foreign reporter, who later covered the war in the Balkans.

Janine drove all us feminists (Natasha Walter, author of the The New Feminism, sat opposite me) crackers with her Dallas hair, big boobs and floral tea dresses, and she was the first to admit they were useful in getting her past roadblocks.

When I went to Pakistan to report on the earthquake, I refused to cover my head, which meant I got past soldiers blocking my way to the disaster zone, and my high shoes meant the U.S. Army gave me a lift in their helicopter. The story was always the thing, by any means necessary.

Like most women who compete with men, Logan too has used her womanly wiles to get ahead. When I met her, not long after she landed the job with CBS, making her a household name in America, she admitted she sometimes used her femininity to get a story.

‘In many Third World countries the belief that women are harmless means we can often pass unnoticed at checkpoints,’ she told me.

Logan is not unique, so I find it hard to fathom the level of opprobrium heaped on her. You’d think her surname was Croft, given the way she has always been written about.

Before I met her, I asked other female correspondents what they thought of her. One told me Logan had ‘used her body to get her first job in newspapers’. Another that she wears full make-up while on assignment in war zones.

‘OK,’ Logan said. ‘Let’s start with the one about the fact I got my first job by wearing a mini-skirt and low-cut top. It was my home town of Durban in South Africa, it’s extremely hot, it’s next to the beach, everyone wears T-shirts, and let’s not forget I was 17.’

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