Lara Logan on Marie Colvin’s death: ‘I feel guilty. I feel a little bit responsible’
Lara Logan, CBS chief foreign correspondent, appeared on CBS This Morning to speak about Marie Colvin, a foreign reporter for the Sunday Times who was killed yesterday in Syria, and about the challenges foreign reporters face in cases of extreme civil unrest.
Lara Logan, CBS chief foreign correspondent, appeared on CBS This Morning Thursday to speak about Marie Colvin, a foreign reporter for the Sunday Times who was killed yesterday in Syria, and about the challenges foreign reporters face in cases of extreme civil unrest.
“I feel guilty. I feel a little bit responsible. I feel a little bit like a fraud. Because I feel like that’s my place,” Logan said on Colvin’s death. She continued to discuss how Colvin knew how to navigate dangerous areas such as Homs, Syria where she was killed, and how despite how much Logan felt she should have been there doing that work herself, that it wasn’t smart since she is an easy target for the Syrian government to attack after having been sexually assaulted last year in Egypt.
As for why journalists are targeted by regimes such as Assad’s Logan explains that it is not a isolated case. “It’s not just Syria – it’s every one of these regimes that stands to lose everything,” Logan said. She continued:
[node:ad]These regimes will suffer nothing. Journalists today are in a very difficult position in the Middle East because they can’t be independent third-party witnesses anymore. It’s not the same fight. A very high-powered minister in the Egyptian government declared journalists the ‘enemy of the state,’ and that’s pretty much the same for any of these governments that stand to lose everything. You are the enemy of the state, and by virtue of what you do, you cannot be considered independent, you cannot be considered a third-party in their eyes. You have to remember that because it changes the stakes extraordinarily. Marie Colvin said this was the most dangerous conflict she had ever covered … and that’s really saying something by her standards. And it’s true.
Watch Logan’s full interview below.
