LARA LOGAN

When Peter Jennings was alive, I liked watching the evening news with him on ABC. I thought he had the best coverage and the best grasp of foreign news of anyone on the major networks.

My favorite foreign correspondent in those days was Christina Amanpour on CNN, who I have written about before on this blog as one of the women I have fallen in love with from afar. Her courage, her intelligence, her integrity and her accent, all give her an allure that's impossible to duplicate. There's no one like her on TV period.

After Jennings died, I noticed that ABC moved to the right in its perspective and I checked out other channels to see what they were doing. When Katie Couric took over at CBS I watched that evening news regularly for awhile, but it seemed full of studio gimmicks that didn't raise the level of the news coverage nor compliment Couric's particular charisma and personality.

Then I started watching Brian Williams on NBC and found him the closest to what I dug about Jennings, in terms of coverage, intelligence, honesty, etc. But I would jump over to CBS to see how Couric was doing now and then, and usually I didn't like it as her coverage either swung to the right or the left or from perky to overly serious etc.

Then one night quite a while ago, a year or so maybe, I switched over to CBS and a stunningly beautiful woman with a British accent (I couldn't quite locate it's origins, Australia? South Africa? Britain? or with her name Ireland via England?) was reporting from the field in Iraq at a time when most correspondents were reporting from safe locations there.

She not only seemed fearless, like Amanpour, and as beautiful or more so than any movie star, but unbelievably direct in her reporting, not cushioning any realities, and with such intelligence and clarity I wondered why I didn't know who she was, or why the entire world didn't.

Since then I try to catch her reports whenever I can and am always knocked out by not just their comprehensive honesty and her obvious bravery, but by how insightful and free of all the detritus of most "American" reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then last night, watching the John Stewart Show, which lately has returned to being the best source for truthful news, despite the satire and parodies, or actually because of them, and his guest was Lara Logan.

I think he was thrown by not only her honesty and her beauty, but she was a little self-conscious being in a one-on-one situation with a comedian and trying to match his comic skills, so the interview is not as revealing about the war(s) as it could have been, but watch it until the end and you'll see it gets there.

[The link doesn't seem to work, though I can still go to Comedy Central and locate John Stewart and find clips from last night's show and find the interview with Lara Logan, but when I put in the URL for it, it keeps coming up empty, with much older shows listed. Maybe someone more techno skilled can help?]

[Thanks to "Butch in Waukegan" for this link to another source, scroll down for the video of Lara Logan's appearance on The Daily Show.]