Laura Ling is one of the most popular and richest Journalist who was born on December 1, 1976 in Carmichael, United States. Her father Doug was an immigrant from China born in mainland China in the 1920s. Her mother, Mary Meiyan (nee Wang) is an Immigrant of Tainan, Taiwan and was the director of the Los Angeles office of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs. They divorced at the age of Laura was just four years old, and her sister Lisa was seven years old. After the divorce, the sisters were brought up within Sacramento, California, by their father. Ling declares herself to be Chinese American. Ling was a student at Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks, California.
Ling was selected as among Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year in 2009. The year 2011 was the same. Ling won her McGill Medal for Courage in Journalism of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication In 2014, she received the Emmy Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award (Radio Television Digital News Association) for SoCal Connected. As of 2012, Ling received an induction into the San Juan Education Foundation Hall of Fame. As Coordinator of Development as well as the Director of Discovery Digital Networks, Ling was awarded the Gracie Award in 2016.
In the last week of March 2009, North Korea announced that two American journalists were detained and would be indicted and tried for illegally entering the country. On May 3, 2009, it was officially announced that Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee were the journalists that had been detained, after they attempted to film refugees along the border with China. In June 2009, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor prison for illegal entry into North Korea, and unspecified hostile acts. Of the trial, Ling stated, “I had tried to prepare myself for a lengthy sentence, but really nothing could prepare me for the verdict when I heard the words twelve years…he said, no forgiveness, no appeal…And I was wondering if those words meant that the window of opportunity had closed and my fate was sealed.” Many in the media called it a show trial. The US government made diplomatic efforts to oppose this sentence before their release in August 2009.
Laura Ling is married to Iain Clayton, a financial analyst. On June 3, 2010, Ling gave birth to a girl, naming her Li Jefferson Clayton, in Burbank, California. Laura and her husband decided to name the baby Li, after Laura’s sister Lisa, and chose Jefferson since it was President Clinton’s middle name. They also have a son named Kai, born on December 18, 2013.
Ling’s journalistic career began when she was an KCET correspondent on SoCal Connected and producer for Channel One News. She was the co-creator of Breaking it Down, a documentary series on MTV which aired from 1999 between 1999 and 2001. Following that, Ling joined Current TV and reported on the issues surrounding Cuba, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, the West Bank, and the Amazon River, as well as on shantytowns and shantytowns located that are located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, homeless teenagers located in Los Angeles, and underground churches in China. Prior to her detention she was reporting on her experiences during the Mexican Drug War, and when she was arrested, arrest, Ling was undercover making an investigative documentary about North Korean defectors, who mostly were women and the dangers they faced when they crossed the Chinese border to Tumen River. Tumen River including forced marriages and trafficking, deportation and being seen as an incriminating criminal.
