Lara Logan Sues New York Magazine for $25 Million over ‘Hagan Hit Piece’

Former 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan is suing New York magazine over an article she claims hurt her career.

“The story concerned a report by Logan in 2013 on ’60 Minutes’ about the 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans were killed in the attack, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens,” according to the Hill.

However, Logan’s report was retracted one month after it aired when key facts from an interview with British security contractor Dylan Davies were determined to be false.

The journalist apologized to viewers on CBS This Morning a few weeks after the retraction for including Davies’ statements in the piece but also added that the essential parts of the report were true.

The recent lawsuit refers to writer Joe Hagan’s 2014 article about Logan titled “Benghazi and the Bombshell,” calling it the “Hagan Hit Piece.”

“The headline reference to ‘Bombshell’ was both sexist, insulting and defamatory at the same time,” the lawsuit said.

Wednesday, Lauren Starke, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, said Hagan’s piece was “thoroughly vetted and fact-checked, and we stand by our reporting,” according to the Star Tribune.

Logan is seeking $25 million in the lawsuit that was filed in Austin, Texas, last week.

In February, Logan said politics and political discourse had “infiltrated” how reporters cover different topics during an interview on Fox & Friends. 

She commented:

The thing is, it doesn’t mean if you’re a Democrat … or you’re on the left that you can’t be a professional journalist, right? I’m not saying that there aren’t any good journalists on the left, that everyone is a political operative. I’m saying there’s too much politics, there are too many political operatives and too much political discourse that’s infiltrated what passes for journalism.

“Look at the language. It’s so pejorative. I mean, what happened to reporting the facts?” Logan concluded.

The same month, Logan called the left-leaning media “political activists” and “propagandists” during a podcast interview with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland.

She continued:

Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them. And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me.

Logan added that she was targeted by Media Matters for America (MMFA) after her report on Benghazi was aired.

“I made one comment about Benghazi,” she said, “[Then] I was targeted by Media Matters for America, which was an organization established by David Brock, who has dedicated himself to the Clintons. It was their known propaganda organization.”