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Pressure Mounts On CBS To Re-Investigate Discredited Benghazi Report
US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was one of four people killed in the attack
By Michael Calderone, The Huffington Post – May 5, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/mywfqgz
NEW YORK — Media Matters chairman David Brock is urging top CBS News executives to re-open the network’s internal investigation over its discredited “60 Minutes” report on the Benghazi attack.
Lara Logan, the network’s chief foreign correspondent, and Max McClellan, her producer, went on leave following the network’s internal review and have not returned. A New York magazine report, published Sunday night, has renewed interest in the network controversy and provided new details about how the erroneous Oct. 27 story — which featured a discredited “eyewitness” and several unsourced claims about the September 2012 attack that killed four Americans — ever made it on air.
Brock, who founded the progressive media watchdog, addressed Monday’s letter to CBS News chairman and “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager and CBS News president David Rhodes. In the letter, he wrote that the New York magazine story “raises critical questions about the validity of CBS’ investigation.”
“Re-opening the investigation is warranted as it now appears that CBS’ internal investigation was not thorough, was wrong on critical points, and omitted key facts — facts that would have revealed that Logan’s report was tainted by partisanship and unprofessional conduct,” Brock wrote.
Specifically, Brock noted that the internal review said Logan had reached out to security firm Blue Mountain, the State Department and the FBI regarding Dylan Davies, the security contractor who claimed to have witnessed the attack but was later revealed to have told his employer and the FBI that he did not reach the compound that night. New York magazine’s Joe Hagan reported that Logan did not contact the State Department or FBI.
Brock also wrote that CBS’ review did not disclose that Logan consulted with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of administration’s toughest critics on Benghazi, while preparing the story. The morning after Logan’s “60 Minutes” report aired, Graham seized upon Davies’ bogus account as evidence that all the Benghazi survivors had not been heard from and that Obama administration appointees should be blocked until all witnesses had testified before Congress.
“Did CBS know how closely Logan was collaborating with Sen. Graham on the Benghazi report?” Brock asked. “If so, why was this not disclosed on air or in CBS’ review of the erroneous report?”
In the letter, Brock also raised questions about reported restrictions placed on other CBS reporters while Logan pursued the Benghazi story, as well as questions about the vetting process prior to its broadcast.
Brock, a right-wing Clinton antagonist in the 1990s, turned left and went on to found Media Matters and super PAC American Bridge. He recently started Correct the Record, a new initiative to defend Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of State at the time of the Benghazi attack. In October, Brock wrote “The Benghazi Hoax,” an e-book examining how Republicans and conservative media have promoted what he considers a “phony scandal.”
Media Matters comprehensively covered inconsistencies in Davies’ account of the night of the attack, and Brock called upon Fager and Rhodes to retract the story on Nov. 1.
But CBS did not retract it, and went on to ignore or sidestep HuffPost’s questions about the conflicting accounts for nearly a week. The “60 Minutes” report completely unraveled on Nov. 7, with Logan apologizing on air the next morning.
In Monday’s letter, Brock reiterated his previous call for CBS to conduct an independent investigation, similar to the one that followed Dan Rather’s 2004 report on George W. Bush’s military service with the Texas Air National Guard. The independent committee produced a 224-page report, and as a result CBS ousted four employees. Rather, his role diminished, left the network in 2006.
“As long as these discrepancies and questions remain unaddressed and until full accountability is taken, it is impossible for that to happen,” Brock wrote, adding that he hopes the executives “take this opportunity to reassure your viewers of CBS’ standards and accountability.”
Lara Logan
Lara Logan’s Future At CBS Uncertain Since Discredited Benghazi Report
BY Michael Calderone, The Huffington Post – May 5, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/p9s8pt6
NEW YORK — On Oct. 28, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he planned to block all of President Barack Obama’s appointees until every survivor of the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack testified before Congress, a vow that came the morning after a bombshell CBS “60 Minutes” report based on the account of a new eyewitness.
What wasn’t known at the time was that Graham had consulted with CBS correspondent Lara Logan on the now-discredited Benghazi report that led to her being sidelined from the network for over six months. The Oct. 27 report started unraveling four days after airing, following revelations that security contractor Dylan Davies, the “60 Minutes” eyewitness, had given conflicting stories about his whereabouts during the attack.
But the “60 Minutes” report was flawed in other ways, including Logan making unsourced assertions that Al Qaeda was behind the attack that killed four Americans and controlled a local hospital. It’s still not clear where Logan got this information, but according to Graham, he informed her that it was a “fair thing to say” in his opinion, and that he thought there was a “build-up of Al Qaeda types” in Benghazi. When the report began falling apart, Logan also called Graham to help determine what account Davies had previously given to the FBI — a fact she never checked when originally reporting the story.
Logan’s interaction with Graham, before and after the broadcast, is one of the new details about the infamous Benghazi report found in a New York magazine feature published Sunday night. Contributing editor Joe Hagan traced Logan’s rapid ascent at CBS, aided by telegenic looks and fearlessness — or, to some colleagues, recklessness — in war zones. Logan’s deference to top commanders and increasingly strident opinions had already set off alarm bells within the network that she could not aggressively, and skeptically, cover military, New York reports. “It’s not an accident that Lara Logan f*cked up,” an unnamed CBS News told the magazine. “It was inevitable. Everybody saw this coming.”
New York reports that Logan’s work on Benghazi only elevated concerns that she was out of control. Morley Safer, a veteran of the show for 45 years, demanded that “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Jeff Fager fire Logan, according to New York. CBS has reportedly forced Logan to cancel recent speaking appearances, and while Fager has said that Logan will come back this year, Hagan writes that her “return appears less and less certain.”
The Benghazi debacle was the biggest black eye for the long-running newsmagazine since “Rathergate,” in which former network star Dan Rather aired unsubstantiated documents related to George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. As The Huffington Post reported in November, “60 Minutes” initially dodged serious questions about Logan’s report, and Fager defended it a day before the story collapsed. On Nov. 11, Logan apologized on air for the report. A couple weeks later, after an internal review, she and her producer, Max McClellan, went on leave from the network.
So how did such a flawed report end up on air? Logan had long been looking for a new Benghazi angle, according to Hagan, and McClellan was offered an exclusive look at Davies’ memoir, scheduled to be published on Oct. 29 by a conservative imprint of CBS subsidiary Simon & Schuster. Davies, the unreliable eyewitness, became central to a report that “60 Minutes” was billing as a year-long investigation. Hagan writes:
Fager delegated the details of vetting the piece to [producer Bill] Owens, whom he’d groomed to be his successor at 60 Minutes but whom some CBS colleagues felt was stretched thin by his duties. Because of the short deadline, and because it was a book by a sister company, 60 Minutes’ usual fact-checking procedures were not followed. No calls were made to the State Department or the FBI specifically to vet Davies’s claims.
Logan’s own credulity, it seems, was the central pillar of the report. When asked why she found Davies’s account believable, Logan said that Davies was one of the “best guys you’ll ever meet” and a few minutes with him would convince anyone of his candor, according to a person familiar with her comments. And Davies’s tale of heroic special-forces operators being let down by politicians and bureaucrats thousands of miles from the front made sense in the world in which Logan had been living for the better part of a decade. And while that narrative cast might have raised eyebrows at the old CBS News, the politics in the post-Rather era were more complicated — McClellan leans more conservative than has been traditional at the show.
Here, then, was a convergence, the proverbial perfect storm: Fager had given Logan outsize power; Owens, Fager’s acolyte, didn’t ask the boss’s star the tough questions; and McClellan, a true-blue Logan loyalist, didn’t have the desire or the authority to bring Logan to heel. On top of that, the senior vice-president of standards and practices, Linda Mason, whose job it was to bring outside scrutiny to any segment, had departed in early 2013, and Fager never replaced her. Logan was free to operate as she chose.
Chris Stevens, US Ambassador to Libya, killed in Benghazi Attack – September 12, 2012
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