CBS: We Do Give a Damn about our Bad Reputation!

It has been evident for quite some time that news organizations were more about access to right wing politicians and audiences than the truth.  CNN has descended into People Magazine territory to compete with FOX.  The Home of Walter Cronkite and 60 minutes, well, it’s been bad.  Don’t even get me started on Meet the Press that is now aptly called Dancin’ Dave’s Disco.  It appears CBS decided Lara Logan went a bridge to0 far down the right wing memes and lies highway.

CBS News’ Lara Logan Taking Leave Of Absence Over Discredited ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Report

Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of ‘”60 Minutes,” informed staff Tuesday that Lara Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, would be taking a leave of absence following an internal report on the news magazine’s discredited Oct. 27 Benghazi report.

“As Executive Producer, I am responsible for what gets on the air,” Fager wrote in a memo obtained by The Huffington Post. “I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have.”

On the Oct. 27 broadcast, Logan interviewed Dylan Davies, a security officer who claimed that he witnessed the terrorist attack on the Benghazi compound that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. Davies, who had trained Libyan security guards for the State Department, claimed he scaled a 12-foot wall that night, knocked out a terrorist with his rifle and later saw Stevens dead in the hospital.

But four days later, The Washington Post reported that Davies had told his employer shortly after the attack that he never reached the compound that night, an account that conflicted with the one he had given to “60 Minutes,” as well as included in a memoir. The memoir was published by a conservative imprint that is a subsidiary of CBS, a financial relationship that was not disclosed at the time of the broadcast.

“60 Minutes” dodged questions for several days about the conflicting accounts.

Media outlet after media outlet discredited the report while CBS stood by the story.  It finally eeked out a well, it seems it coulda been a little more accurate sorta kinda apology.

Now, well, read the headline.

The rest of the pundit herds are circling the near dead Logan assuming she will head to FOX where she can lie with impunity.

It took a while, but CBS has concluded an internal investigation of the 60 Minutes Benghazi! story, and reporter Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan are taking a “leave of absence” that has been strongly recommended by their boss, CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager.

Most of the reaction to this development has focused on the question of what CBS has learned from this deeply embarrassing incident. But I wonder about Lara Logan. Will she take her medicine and climb back up the slippery pole of on-camera talent she seemed to be ascending quite rapidly before she decided to begin a new Benghazi! furor? Or will she make a strategic retreat into celebrity reporting or science reporting or sports reporting?

The short-cut for her, of course, will be to assume the mantle of Conservative Media Martyr and land a gig with Fox, where there will be no “internal investigations” of reporters who bend the rules in pursuit of Big Stories likeBenghazi!. If she resists that temptation, then perhaps there is hope for her as a legitimate journalist who admits when she’s wrong and rededicates herself to journalism.

Where’s Dan Rather now?

Wondering if Logan and McClellan are being paid while they’re away.

Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of ‘”60 Minutes,” informed staff Tuesday that Lara Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, would be taking a leave of absence following an internal report on the news magazine’s discredited Oct. 27 Benghazi report. 

Fager’s memo and findings of an internal review [are at the link.]

Always thought Rather was set up to take that fall. CBS caved to wingnut’s invented outrage. Certainly Rather’s investigation was not so thoroughly disgraced at this Benghazi hoax, or should we call it a paean to wingnut conspiracy blather. Yet he was fired and he was blackballed from appearing on air during their JFK anniversary coverage just days ago. At the very least Dan Rather is owed a huge apology.

CBS is now saying it should’ve never aired the piece.

On Tuesday, CBS News completed an internal review of the process that led to 60 Minutes’discredited Benghazi story, for which the show has apologized and which has now caused correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan to take leaves of absence. An hour later, Brian Stelter, in his inaugural appearance as CNN’s media reporter, said that the review showed 60 Minutes never should have broadcast the story, and “shouldn’t have dug in their heels” once it was criticized.

“What the standards report suggests is that this shouldn’t have gotten on the air in the first place,” Stelter said. “This report shouldn’t have been broadcast at all.”

“Once it was broadcast,” he continued, “CBS did exactly the wrong thing: they got up against the wall, they got defensive, they got in this defensive crouch. Often times see sports teams or companies or nonprofits make these mistakes, where they try to defend themselves rather than figure out what went wrong. Well, finally they did figure it out. They did this long report to try to figure out what was right and what was wrong about the story. They found that parts of the story were true and parts of the story belonged on television. But that main source you mentioned, he was discredited. And as a result, it shouldn’t have been broadcast at all.”

About friggin time. And apologize to Dan Rather while you are at it boyz!!!