Lara Logan: why don’t we have her here in the UK?

UK viewers who travel to the States on occasion might choose to watch the news there, just to see what’s happening in the world.

Big mistake.

The usual reaction is "WTF is this? This isn’t a news programme." This goes for network TV news as much as it goes for cable news.

You might even be fooled by CNN’s excellent world news service, available in every country in the world except the US, into watching a similarly entitled network called "CNN" in the US. Again, big mistake, since it’s absolute rubbish that treats you like an infant who needs to be dragged away from an XBox to be told… well, nothing very important usually.

And let’s not start with Fox News. Just don’t.

Suddenly, the BBC, Sky News and ITN seem like Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.

Yet, there is one area where the US has the edge: they have Lara Logan as CBS’s chief foreign correspondent. Here she is on The Daily Show. Don’t you wish all reporters were like her? More importantly, she’s married to an English guy and comes from South Africa – isn’t it the bounden duty of all South Africans to come and work in Britain? At least, that’s what I thought.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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