It took Lara Logan just over four years to go from CBS News correspondent to QAnon-spouting conspiracy theorist deemed excessively toxic by Fox News and Newsmax.

On Wednesday morning, Media Matters’ Jason Campbell highlighted Logan’s claim during a Newsmax segment the previous night that “the open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world” through a nefarious global cabal that “dine[s] on the blood of children.” Logan’s comments swiftly drew criticism from journalists who noted their overlap with the QAnon conspiracy theory, and the network issued a statement within hours condemning her “reprehensible statements” and saying, “We have no plans to interview her again.”

The ban from Newsmax marks the latest low point in Logan’s dizzying fall. Her recent career is a cautionary tale about how attention-seeking would-be heroes to the right can overstep even the marginal guardrails its institutions establish. 

But it also shows just how much they will let you get away with in the modern right-wing media ecosystem and Republican Party. Just days before her Newsmax appearance, Logan moderated a forum featuring five GOP nominees for secretary of state.

Logan’s post-Benghazi rebranding as a Fox commentator

A decade ago, Logan was an award-winning foreign correspondent. A fast-rising star at CBS, she was acclaimed for her broadcasts from war zones and her reports aired on the most celebrated news show on a major U.S. network. 

But Logan’s reputation took a hit after she based an October 2013 segment for 60 Minutes on the claims of a purported “eyewitness” to the attacks on U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya, who turned out to have fabricated his story. Following scrutiny from Media Matters and other outlets, CBS ultimately retracted her report, Logan apologized for it, and, following an internal investigation, she took a leave of absence. Logan returned to the network six months later and remained there until 2018, when she and CBS News quietly parted ways.

Logan’s departure from CBS was revealed only after she attempted to remake herself as the victim of left-wing cancel culture during a February 2019 podcast interview. She claimed to have been “targeted” by Media Matters due to a speech she gave criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks, adding that “nothing that was said about me in the wake of that was true.”

On the facts, this was patently false — Media Matters had little to say about Logan before her flawed October 2013 Benghazi segment or following her return from her leave of absence; CBS News wouldn’t have cared what we had to say if we weren’t correct; and Logan herself had apologized to viewer and publicly acknowledged that “the truth is that we made a mistake” in hosting the purported “eyewitness.”

But Logan’s bogus rewriting of history made perfect sense as an effort to rebrand for a career in right-wing media. Within that ecosystem, grievance is the coin of the realm, and Media Matters is a bitter foe. Together with her rants in the same interview against the media’s purported liberal bias, Logan set herself up for a second act, just as Bernie Goldberg and Sharyl Attkisson had done before her in transitioning from CBS journalists to right-wing stars.

It worked. Logan’s initial pivot garnered a flurry of favorable coverage on the right and a prime-time interview with Sean Hannity, who urged his network to hire her. And sure enough, Fox announced that November that she would host a show on its Fox Nation streaming service, and she soon began making regular appearances on the network. 

At Fox, Logan’s work was characterized by her willingness to be taken in by hoaxes about antifa and paranoid conspiracy theories about the purported stealing of the 2020 presidential election; the United Nations plot to destroy the “sovereignty of our own bodies” by forcing us “to take a vaccine that's not really a vaccine”; the Biden administration ruling that “you are classified as a domestic terrorist just for supporting Trump in the last election”; and the deployment of migrants as “a virus bomb or a virus attack in your own country.”

But Logan’s Fox career ended abruptly after a November 2021 appearance, highlighted by Media Matters, in which she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to “Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews.” Fox hosts had said a lot of incendiary things about Fauci over the years, but this was apparently a bridge too far for the network’s brass. Following widespread outrage, the network publicly distanced itself from her and she disappeared from its airwaves.

After Fox, Logan descends even further into the right-wing fever swamps — and retains GOP influence

Logan’s Fauci comment may have cost her access to Fox’s viewers. But the right-wing media ecosystem contains multitudes of competitors who eagerly snap up the opportunity to host right-wing personalities who fall out of favor with Fox. Over the last 11 months, Logan has appeared on Fox’s cable TV rivals at Newsmax and One America News Network, as well as on an array of right-wing podcasts and fringe media outlets.

Logan used those appearances to go ever deeper down the right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole. She invoked the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, claimed that the January 6 insurrection was “orchestrated just like Charlottesville was orchestrated,” and linked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the occult. She ranted about astral projection and aliens. She described COVID-19 vaccines as “genocide by government” and said that right-wing Americans are “sitting at the gates of Auschwitz right now.” She claimed that Darwinism is a plot orchestrated by “the Rothschilds,” that the United Nations is “infiltrating 100 million people into the United States as the basis for forming a regional government instead of a national government,” and that the Illuminati fought with the British against the American revolutionaries and infiltrated the country.

None of this apparently discouraged Newsmax from hosting Logan this week.

Nor has it prevented Logan from wielding influence within a Republican Party that has little interest in weeding out its right-wing extremists. Over the summer, she moderated a GOP congressional primary debate. And just last weekend, she moderated an “election integrity forum” featuring election-denying GOP secretary of state nominees from Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Nevada.

There is an audience for Logan’s conspiracy theories. As long as that’s true, there will be someone in the right-wing media ecosystem willing to offer her a microphone.