Ling was born in Sacramento, California to parents Doug and Mary Ling. They divorced when she was 7 years old. Following the divorce, she and her sister, Laura, were raised in the city of Sacramento, California by their father. She graduated from Del Campo High School in 1991.

The View

Ling started in television when she was chosen as one of the four hosts of Scratch, a nationally-syndicated teen magazine show based in Sacramento. At 18, she joined Channel One News as one of their youngest reporters and anchor. Among her roles was war correspondent, including assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has won several awards for her reporting and documentaries. She attended the University of Southern California. Lisa Ling is fluent in Spanish.

She joined The View on August 2, 1999, but left the show after three and a half years towards the end of 2002 to go back to international reporting. She was responsible for proposing segments like investing for women, and, according to Ling, her goal was to say one thing each day that would make people think, whether it made them cheer or made them throw things at their TV. She drew both fire and praise for her comments after the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which she said, "What happened to the United States was a catastrophic event and the worst terrorist attack in human history. Yet maybe before we seek revenge, we should ask the question — why should anyone want to make such an attack on the U.S.?"

National Geographic and Oprah

Ling accepted an offer to host National Geographic Ultimate Explorer. In 2005, the show moved to the National Geographic Channel and returned to its original name, National Geographic Explorer. Ling has covered the drug war in Colombia, investigated the notorious MS-13 gang, and explored the culture of U.S. prisons.

She then became a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show which has featured many of Ling's investigative pieces, including a report on North Korea. Ling's title is "Oprah Show Investigative Reporter." She also has reported on bride burning in India, gang rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, child trafficking in Ghana, under cover investigation of Pennsylvanian puppy mills with Main Line Animal Rescue, the immediate aftermath of the hurricane in New Orleans, and the April 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre.

Current career and future

In December 2008, CNN's award winning documentary Planet in Peril featured Ling in the series' second installment, called "Battlelines". She was a correspondent that tracked excessive shark fishing in Costa Rica, elephant poaching in Chad, and gave people an inside look at the battle for the control over oil in Nigeria.

On April 2, 2009, it was announced she will get a talk show on a future channel The Oprah Winfrey Network, which will launch in 2010.

Ling has dated actor Rick Yune and, in late 2002, broke off her engagement to media entrepreneur Philip Levine, citing as a reason her constant traveling.

On January 3, 2007, she announced her engagement to Chicago-based radiation oncologist Paul Song, 41. They married on May 26, 2007, in their hometown of Los Angeles. The wedding party included guests such as Connie Chung, one of Lisa's personal heroes, and actresses Kelly Hu and Diane Farr. On June 7, 2009, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from National University, after giving the commencement speech there.

Her younger sister, Laura Ling, also a journalist, is managing editor of Vanguard at Current TV. In March 2009 Laura and her colleague Euna Lee were detained by North Korea for illegal entry into the country. They had been attempting to film refugees along the border with China. In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor prison for illegal entry into North Korea, and unspecified hostile acts.

North Korea released Laura and Euna on August 4, 2009 after a visit from former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Laura and Lisa went on to collaborate on the first book either has had published, Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home, published in May 2010.