Fox Kept Cutting Away From Democrats During Benghazi Hearing

 EMILY ARROWOOD/Media Matters For America

Fox News repeatedly cut away from live coverage of a House Benghazi hearing when Democrats held the floor. 

Former deputy CIA director Michael Morell testified on April 2 before the House Intelligence Committee about the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Fox afforded extensive live coverage to the hearing, beginning with opening statements from Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-CA), and Morell.

For nearly an hour, Fox stayed live on the hearings without interruption, airing over 20 minutes of questioning from the Republican chairman. But when Rogers yielded the floor to Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (CA) to question Morell, Fox cut away to hear "analysis" from a network contributor, breaking live footage for the first time.

As the hearing went on, a pattern emerged -- out of the five Democrats who asked questions at the hearing, four saw Fox break live coverage less than a minute into their time, with the network choosing instead to air commentary or go to commercial break. Fox allowed the questioning of only one Democrat, Ruppersberger, to air for over 60 seconds. In contrast, the network aired a majority of Republican congressmen's questions, cutting away from only one Republican, Rep. Joe Heck (NV).

In all, Republicans were granted live coverage for an average of 5 minutes of questioning, while time given to Democrats averaged 3:16 minutes (an average heavily helped by coverage of Ruppersberger's questions). 

Fox has repeatedly campaigned for more Benghazi hearings, no matter their efficacy, and celebrated when their demands were answered. It only follows that the network would politicize its coverage of these repetitive hearings as well. 

Darrell Issa Ignores Congressional Report On Benghazi To Attack Hillary Clinton

BY HAYES BROWN/Think Progress

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight Committee and one of the leading voices in attacking the Obama administration over its response to the Benghazi attack,completely ignored a recent Congressional investigation’s conclusions in the name of attacking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Speaking at a fundraising dinner in Concord, NH on Monday night, Issa was asked about his committee’s efforts to get to the bottom of just what occurred the night of Sept. 11, 2012 when a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya came under attack. One persistent theoryamong conservatives has been that at some point during the night, a “stand down” order was given to the military, preventing them from rescuing the Americans under attack. “We need to have an answer of when the Secretary of Defense had assets that he could have begun spinning up,” Issa said at the fundraiser during a question and answer segment. “Why there was not one order given to turn on one Department of Defense asset?”

“I have my suspicions, which is Secretary Clinton told Leon [Panetta] to stand down, and we all heard about the stand down order for two military personnel,” Issa continued. “That order is undeniable.”

But there is one group of people that would deny Issa’s claims: his Republican colleagues in the House Armed Services Committee. Just last week, the committee’s majority released their report on the Pentagon’s actions during the night of the attack, which explicitly denied the existence of the order Issa claims happened. “There was no ‘stand down’ order issued to U.S. military personnel in Tripoli who sought to join the fight in Benghazi,” the report says within its first few pages.

It appears that Issa hasn’t read the rest of his compatriots’ report just yet either, judging by the rest of his remarks. “They were told not to get on – get off the airplane and kind of standby – and they’re going to characterize it wasn’t stand down,” Issa said, referring to the Obama administration. “But when we’re done with Benghazi, the real question is, was there a stand down order to Leon Panetta or did he just not do his job? Was there a stand down order from the President who said he told them to use their resources and they didn’t use them? Those questions have to be answered.”

Luckily for him, those questions already have been answered. “Given the military’s preparations on September 11, 2012, majority members have not yet discerned any response alternatives that could have likely changed the outcome of the Benghazi attack,” the report concludes.

When the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog asked Oversight Committee spokesman Frederick Hill about the report, he responded that Issa was asking a “very straightforward question” in blaming Clinton. He also pointed out that the HASC report did not “draw a conclusion about whether the State Department sought to discourage, limit, or constrain a military response,” thus making whether or not Clinton ordered a stand down that never happened a legitimate line of inquiry.

Issa has been at the forefront of GOP attacks against the Obama administration over Benghazi, using his position to launch hearing after hearing over the situation, despite never producing the smoking gun he insists exists. Those repeated attacks over the past year and a half have yet to gain much traction among the American people. He’s also gotten in troublewith his Democrat counterparts for taking secret trips to Benghazi without informing them.

And highlighting Clinton’s role in the response is likely to become more frequent as the primary season for the 2016 presidential election approaches. Clinton is described as the presumptive front runner of the race, and is already the subject of polling about voter beliefs about Benghazi. In late December, in the face of a New York Times report on the attack, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) insinuated that a coordinated rollout of news stories was occurring to smooth the path for Clinton’s eventual nomination. (HT: Oliver Willis)

UPDATE

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Issa on Friday, calling on him to apologize for his remarks:

“The definition of treason is the betrayal of allegiance owed to one’s country, and your statements seem to accuse former Secretary Clinton of this offense. You suggest that Secretary Clinton directed the Secretary of Defense of the United States to intentionally withhold military assistance that may have saved the lives of one of her own ambassadors and three other brave Americans serving their country. Your accusations are beyond the pale, and you should immediately retract them and issue a public apology.”

Fox News Doesn't Care About The "Bloody Senate Report"

OLIVIA KITTEL/Media Matters For America:

"I don't care about the bloody report!"

With that, Bill O'Reilly delivered the climax to a night of Senate report denialism on Fox News.   

This week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the results of its investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi. The report dispelled many of Fox News' favorite conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks, including the myth that the Obama administration engaged in a cover-up by suggesting the attacks may have grown out of protests outside U.S. facilities in Benghazi over an anti-Islam video, an idea then-U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice suggested in a series of interviews on the broadcast Sunday shows three days after the attacks.

And yet, Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Bret Baier continued to push these myths, even when covering the Senate report that debunked them.

On the January 16 edition of Special Report, guest A.B. Stoddard pointed out that the report found no evidence of a cover-up, and Baier responded, "You said no cover-up, but there's clearly an open question about this story about the protests, and about where that all came from."

Bill O'Reilly went even further, peppering guest James Carville with questions about the origins of Rice's suggestion that the attacks may have originated from a protest over the film. Carville attempted to explain that the Senate report answered O'Reilly's question, but the Fox host repeatedly interrupted him, finally yelling, "I don't care about the bloody report":

The Senate report makes clear where reports of a protest were born -- from the intelligence community. The report noted that the intelligence community (IC) received and disseminated an account in the immediate aftermath of the assault that there had been protests against the anti-Islam video at the diplomatic facility prior to the attack, based largely on press accounts that made that claim. The report also revealed that it took days for eyewitness statements by U.S. personnel indicating that there had been no protests to make their way into CIA assessments -- this information was not reviewed or disseminated until after Rice's statements.

What's more, the Senate's findings specifically dismissed the notion of a cover-up, stating:

The Majority concludes that the interagency coordination process on the talking points followed normal, but rushed coordination procedures and that there were no efforts by the White House or any other Executive Branch entities to "cover-up" facts or make alterations for political purposes.

Fox News' heavy coverage of the Senate report has consistently ignored the facts in the report in order to smear the administration's response.

Fox: Where The Chris Christie Scandal Is Really Just About Benghazi

EMILY ARROWOOD/Media Matters For America:

Fox News can't seem to talk about the Chris Christie bridge closure scandal without invoking Benghazi.

Fox & Friends devoted five segments during its January 10 broadcast to the growing scandal surrounding Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his administration's involvement in deliberate traffic gridlock across the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ.

But in every segment purporting to discuss Christie, the hosts and guests used the story to attack President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by bringing up the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.  

Right-wing media figures have attempted to deflect from the Christie saga by attacking Obama and Clinton with tired myths, a tactic Fox's coverage took to new heights today. But the network's dogged determination to tie Benghazi to the Christie story is contextualized by new revelations about Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and his focus on influencing national politics.

Ailes has long expressed a love for Christie and reportedly lobbied hard for him to throw his hat in the ring for the 2012 presidential race. As a New York Times article on the upcoming biography of Ailes explained, he aimed in 2012 to use Fox News to "elect the next president."

Media critics have already begun speculating that Fox's scant coverage of the Christie scandal the day it broke is evidence of a motivation to protect Christie's political brand before the 2016 election. The network's attempt to hide Christie behind Benghazi only strengthens that view. 

Will Benghazi Facts Penetrate The Right-Wing Bubble?

JEREMY HOLDEN/media Matters

Here we go again.

One year after creating a fact-free bubble in the run up to the last election, media conservatives are once again denying reality, this time in service of reanimating the Benghazi hoax that ensnared news organizations throughout 2012, denying authoritative evidence that should finally put an end to the hoax.

An exhaustive New York Times investigation into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, published on December 28, discredited the key elements of the right-wing campaign to politicize the attack -- a desperate attempt to bring down the Obama administration and sink a possible presidential run by Hillary Clinton.

Significantly, the Times definitively debunked the myth that al Qaeda played a central role in planning the attack.

Daily Beast contributor Eli Lake, who has been a key validator of the Benghazi hoax, pushed back against the Times, insisting that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. Contrary to what the Times reported, Lake claimed, "evidence has emerged in the last year that does show the participation of militias and fighters with known ties to al Qaeda." Lake specifically cited comments made by Congressmen Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Lake's insistence that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack is in line with Fox News' response to the Times report. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, a Fox News contributor often portrayed as legitimate voice in the national media, accused the Times of covering for Democrats with its report.

This denial of reality is reminiscent of the way the right retreated to a bubble throughout the 2012 election, and poses a real threat to Americans' understanding of international terrorism.

The relentless campaign to insist that al Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Benghazi misinforms the public understanding of that terrorist group and the role that local extremist groups play in international relations. In responding to critics of its reporting, the Times editorial board explained:

Americans are often careless with the term "Al Qaeda," which strictly speaking means the core extremist group, founded by Osama bin Laden, that is based in Pakistan and bent on global jihad.

Republicans, Democrats and others often conflate purely local extremist groups, or regional affiliates, with Al Qaeda's international network. That prevents understanding the motivations of each group, making each seem like a direct, immediate threat to the United States and thus confusing decision-making.

As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson noted, a failure to acknowledge the complexities of extremist groups could lead to tragic real-world results:

Not every angry Muslim, not even every angry Sunni Muslim, is part of Al Qaeda. Using the name so generically and broadly is a deliberate decision not to understand who our enemies are, or to care--if they don't like us, they are Al Qaeda, and we can stop listening.

And how, then, are we supposed to know who our friends are? Insisting that any Muslim who attacks us is Al Qaeda also means that, when we are standing around handing out guns to strangers--something we do a little too often--we'll assume that those who don't strike us as Al Qaeda types won't attack us.

The Benghazi Hoax Chapter 16: 60 Minutes

DAVID BROCK, ARI RABIN-HAVT, & MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

After the publication of Media Matters' ebook The Benghazi Hoax, which tells the story of how the right twisted a tragedy into a failed witch hunt against the Obama administration, CBS News came under fire from media critics and journalism experts for airing a botched 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that featured a supposed eyewitness to the attacks who had lied about his actions the night of the attack. The story resulted in an internal investigation into how 60 Minutes got it wrong and a leave of absence by correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan. Here's the story of how CBS got burned by the Benghazi hoax.

For more on conservative media myths about the September 2012 attack, read The Benghazi Hoax, the new ebook by Media Matters' David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt.

60 Minutes had a bombshell -- or so it thought. Correspondent Lara Logan and her producer Max McClellan had spent more than a year investigating the attack in Benghazi and conducted more than 100 interviews. They wanted to give the news magazine's audience a firsthand account of what took place on September 11, 2012.

The heavily promoted report was 60 Minutes' lead story on the evening of October 27, 2013. Immediately, it was obvious that the program had fallen for several of the previously debunked Benghazi hoaxes. Most notably, in Logan's interview with "whistleblower" Greg Hicks, she led off by saying, "The lingering question is why no larger military response ever crossed the border into Libya."

There were no lingering questions about the military's response. Those questions had been repeatedly asked and answered, by the Accountability Review Board, during congressional hearings, and in numerous media accounts of the event.

For months, generals and former defense secretaries including Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, and Gen. Martin Dempsey had debunked the idea that the United States could have responded to the attack in Benghazi quicker or with more force.

Logan also claimed the CIA teams stationed at the annex was ordered "to wait" before responding to the attack. This falsehood was debunked by the Accountability Review Board, which wrote "the departure of the Annex team was not delayed by orders from superiors."

The new element in CBS' report -- designed to draw buzz to the subject -- was an interview that Logan conducted with "Morgan Jones," who was identified as a "former British soldier" and "security officer who witnessed the attack." 60 Minutes told viewers that "Morgan Jones" was a pseudonym he was using "for his own safety." 

In actuality, "Jones" was a private security contractor named Dylan Davies who worked for Blue Mountain Security, a British company run by a former SAS officer. Blue Mountain was responsible for the diplomatic compound's locally hired unarmed guards, whose assignments included raising and lowering the security gate, checking IDs, and other basic security tasks.

During his 60 Minutes interview, Davies suggested a key problem in Benghazi was that his guards remained unarmed, while a second Libyan security force -- the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a group Davies claimed to be incompetent -- provided armed security. While this claim was in line with the Accountability Review Board's findings, Davies' faith in his own employees at Blue Mountain was contradicted by both media reports about their performance and the Accountability Review Board, which wrote in its unclassified report that the Blue Mountain guards were "poorly skilled."

The most compelling part of Davies' 60 Minutes interview was his harrowing and heroic tale from that night -- one that was the center of a book he had co-written. The book, called The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There, would be published later that week by Threshold, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Unmentioned throughout the 60 Minutes report was the fact that Simon & Schuster and CBS share a parent company, suggesting that CBS could have had a financial motivation for running a report hyping Davies' story.

In the book and on 60 Minutes, Davies talked about hearing gunshots in a phone call he received from one of the local guards he oversaw at the compound, which was 15 minutes away from where he lived in the city. In a plot straight out of a James Bond film, Davies claimed that went to the compound and scaled its 12-foot wall as Al Qaeda fighters rampaged through the facility.

Davies said, "One guy saw me. He just shouted. I couldn't believe that he'd seen me 'cause it was so dark. He started walkin' towards me."

According to the former British soldier, the excitement continued: "I just hit him with the butt of the rifle in the face" and "he went down." This was further dramatized during his interview with Logan, in which she led hersubject:

LARA LOGAN:  He dropped?

MORGAN JONES: Yeah, like -- like a stone.

LOGAN: With his face smashed in?

JONES: Yeah.

The right was ecstatic. Even though the report did not mention President Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they claimed the report had vindicated their year of scandalmongering. Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg expressed the feelings of many on the right, tweeting, "This 60 Minutes #benghazi piece corroborates pretty much everything #foxnews has reported so far." The day after the 60 Minutes segment aired, Fox News would run 13 segments on 11 programs, for a total of more than 47 minutes of coverage. Echoing Goldberg, Bret Baier proclaimed, "Last night, one of journalism's heavy hitters reaffirmed what we knew and had reported on." On Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy blustered, "60 Minutes doesn't cover phony scandals."

From The 700 Club to Breitbart.com, conservatives joined Fox in cheering the 60 Minutes report.

This was ironic, given the fact that 60 Minutes had long been derided by conservatives, in particular for Dan Rather's report on George W. Bush's National Guard service, for which Rather later apologized.

The right's excitement was overblown, as usual. The 60 Minutes report followed the same pattern as every other element of the Benghazi hoax documented in this book. Supposedly new revelations were simply warmed-over versions of hoaxes debunked months before; context that would provide critical information to viewers or readers was missing; and the right-wing media exaggerated the new allegations from the original report into something unrecognizable.

Nothing in the 60 Minutes report implicated Obama or Clinton in any wrongdoing leading up to the attack in Benghazi -- in fact, their names were never mentioned. But conservatives were already on the attack against the president and former secretary of state.

On the Monday after the Davies episode of 60 Minutes aired, Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened to block everynomination before the Senate until "the survivors [of Benghazi] are being made available to Congress." The South Carolina senator never mentioned that the survivors had already answered questions from numerous investigators and that the Senate had access to those interviews. Graham was joined by fellow Benghazi hoaxsters Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Kelly Ayotte in promoting the report.

One moment that raised a red flag the day after the report aired was an offhand statement from Fox News correspondent Adam Housley, who reported that Davies had been a source of his. However, Housley said, he had "stopped speaking to him when he asked for money."

Initially, 60 Minutes refused to apologize, except for its failure to disclose the financial relationship between CBS and the book's publisher. In the middle of that week, the story took its first blow when The Washington Postreported that an incident report from Davies contradicted the account he provided on 60 Minutes and in his book:

In Davies's 2 ¹/ _2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, "we could not get anywhere near ... as roadblocks had been set up."

He learned of Stevens's death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador's blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

60 Minutes held fast, telling the paper that it "stand[s] firmly by the story we broadcast last Sunday."

Over the next few days, CBS stonewalled many in the press, refusing to speak on the phone with several major media reporters, choosing instead to send out terse emails that often failed to answer basic and appropriate questions about the story.

After refusing to speak with The Washington Post, Davies resurfaced to talk with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast. Lake was likely chosen because of his status as a right-wing foreign policy reporter who writes for a mainstream publication. Davies told Lake he "believed there was a coordinated campaign to smear him."

Responding to the idea that there was a discrepancy between the Blue Mountain incident report and the story he told 60 Minutes, Davies claimed he did not write the document in question but that the story it contained did match what he told his supervisor at the company. He said the story in the incident report was a lie he told to hide the fact that he had disobeyed his boss, who had ordered him to stay at his villa.

While 60 Minutes continued to defend its piece, Lara Logan told The New York Times that she "attributed the critical response to the report to the intense political warfare that has surrounded the episode."

Prominent authorities on journalism were not so kind. Interviewed by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, many spoke out in shock at CBS' behavior including Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute who said, "What they should have acknowledged was the fact that he wrote a report saying that he wasn't at the site." She continued, "They should have acknowledged that ... they either didn't know about it or they failed to anticipate that critics would use this as a way of tearing down their story." She concluded that "considering that this guy, that his very presence at the compound that night is in question, they could have tried to verify from other sources that he was. Other sources, even if those were off the record sources, they could have done something to address this discrepancy."

On the evening of November 7, 60 Minutes' story completely imploded. The New York Times' Bill Carter and Michael S. Schmidt reported that Davies "gave the F.B.I. an account of the night that terrorists attacked the mission on Sept. 11, 2012 that contradicts a version of events he provided in a recently published book and in an interview." This contrasted directly with Davies' claim that his interview with the FBI lined up with the account in his book and on 60 Minutes.

CBS finally had to concede the story was fatally flawed. Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, told the Times, "We're surprised to hear about this, and if it shows we've been misled, we will make a correction." The network pulled the story off its website and YouTube channel, and it posted a statement that read: "60 Minutes has learned of new information that undercuts the account told to us by Morgan Jones of his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound. We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction."

Appearing on CBS This Morning the next day, Logan said, "We were wrong. We made a mistake." She also told the audience that 60 Minutes would issue a correction the following Sunday. As CBS offered apologies, Threshold decided to take the costly step of pulling The Embassy House from circulation.

On Sunday, at the tail end of the program, Logan appeared on camera to issue her correction. "We end our broadcast tonight with a correction on a story we reported October 27 about the attack on the American special mission compound in Benghazi, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed," Logan said. "In the story, a security officer working for the State Department, Dylan Davies, told us he went to the compound during the attack and detailed his role that night."

She continued:

After our report aired, questions arose about whether his account was true, when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack. Davies denied having anything to do with that incident report and insisted the story he told us was not only accurate, it was the same story he told the FBI when they interviewed him.

On Thursday night, when we discovered the account he gave the FBI was different than what he told us, we realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at 60 Minutes is the truth, and the truth is, we made a mistake.

The apology was not well received. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote on Twitter, "Two outstanding features of the @60Minutes correction: written in the passive voice, edits out the role played by other news organizations."

Also on Twitter, New York magazine writer Frank Rich observed, "Failure of @CBSNews to report how Lara Logan was duped for 'a year' (her claim) by a Benghazi hoax guarantees others will do it for them."

Former Meet the Press host Marvin Kalb wrote at Politico, "CBS News remains an immensely important resource, but it has now suffered an avoidable setback at a time when all of the media is under a cloud of doubt and suspicion. The network must regain the credibility it lost in Benghazi."

After several days of heavy criticism, CBS announced it was conducting a "journalistic review" of the report. The network gave a statement to McClatchy News that implied the investigation had begun immediately after criticism of the story arose, despite having previously declared it would make no further statements on the matter, and previously stating no such investigation was taking place.

This investigation was not "independent" of CBS. Al Ortiz, executive producer for special events at CBS News, was appointed to head the investigation. Dylan Byers of Politico pointed out the problem with this review: Ortiz is "tasked with conducting an investigation of his own boss, Jeff Fager. Fager is both the executive producer of '60 Minutes' and the chairman of CBS News, which means that any dirt Ortiz digs up on '60 Minutes' reporting will reflect back on the man who pays his check."

Alicia Shepard, former ombudsman at NPR told Joe Strupp of Media Matters, "There's no way that Al Ortiz can do an investigation that anyone outside CBS News, and maybe inside, will find credible at this point." Shepard continued, "The network needs to hire a panel of outside independent journalists and let them loose inside 60 Minutes to find out step by step what happened. And be totally transparent. It's the only way for 60 Minutes to regain its once-stellar reputation. This is so why news organizations still need ombudsmen."

In 2004, following a 60 Minutes story that questioned George W. Bush's service in the National Guard, whose reporting was based in part on forged documents, CBS fired four producers, effectively ended the storied career of anchor Dan Rather, and canceled the 60 Minutes II franchise on which the segment aired. 

Ultimately the pressure grew too great. Two days before Thanksgiving, Jeff Fager sent an email announcing the results of Ortiz's investigation and informing CBS staff that "I have asked Lara Logan, who has distinguished herself and has put herself in harm's way many times in the course of covering stories for us, to take a leave of absence, which she has agreed to do." Additionally Fager "asked the same of producer Max McClellan, who also has a distinguished career at CBS News."

Acknowledging the story was a "regrettable mistake" Fager wrote "when faced with a such an error, we must use it as an opportunity to make our broadcast even stronger."

While clearly CBS was trying to put their Benghazi Hoax behind them, many questions were still left unanswered about the report including:

• How did 60 Minutes find Dylan Davies?
• Was there an agreement with Threshold to promote his book in the lead up to its release?
• Al Ortiz's review does not address the role of senior CBS executives including network Chairman and 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager in the airing of the Benghazi piece. What was the role of Fager and other executives in vetting/approving the segment?
• How long are Logan and McClellan on leave for?
• Ortiz's review repeatedly mentions that a "team" was involved in producing the segment but names no one except Logan and McClellan. Who else was involved in reporting the story? Who reviewed and approved the final draft? Did anyone at any time raise questions about the quality of the reporting?

Until these and other questions are answered CBS will not have moved past its role in perpetuating the Benghazi Hoax. 

60 Minutes’ Lara Logan offers correction on Benghazi story; ‘We made a mistake’

By George Chidi/Raw Story

CBS 60 Minutes issued a correction and an apology Sunday night for a report that aired last month about the attack on the Benghazi compound in 2012, in which the producers included interview material from a source that has had his credibility come under significant challenge.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan said of Dylan Davies, the British contractor at the heart of the controversial story, that 60 Minutes learned Thursday from the FBI that the account Davies told federal investigators was different from what he told news producers. “We realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report,” she said. “For that, we are very sorry.”

While accusing his detractors of conducting a smear campaign, Davies nonetheless admitted to the Washington Post last weekend to lying to a superior about what he had been doing on Sept. 11, 2012, the night of the Benghazi attack.

In an incident report immediately following the attack, Davies said he had been at his beachside villa during much of the calamity. But in his memoir and on 60 Minutes, Davies claimed that he had raced to the Benghazi compound during the attack, climbed a 12-foot wall and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an attacker. Davies claims he told the truth to 60 Minutes and in his new memoir.

But the discrepancy between the two versions appears to have created enough questions about Davies’ credibility to prompt the brief correction.

Watch the correction, below.

The Third Account Of Where 60 Minutes' Benghazi Witness Was That Night

MATT GERTZ/Media Matters For America:

A year before CBS News aired -- and then retracted -- a segment featuring a British security operator claiming to be an eyewitness of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, a U.K. paper reported he wasn't even in the city that night.

Here's the October 14, 2012 report -- differing from the story Dylan Davies apparently told the FBI and his bosses as well as his publisher and CBS' Lara Logan -- from The Telegraph:

Darryl Davies, the manager of the Benghazi contract for Blue Mountain, flew out of the city hours before the attack was launched. The Daily Telegraph has learned that relations between the firm and its Libyan partner had broken down, leading to the withdrawal of Mr Davies.

Any attempt to fact-check Davies' story should have included Googling his name and that of his company, which would have unearthed the Telegraph story. While there's no evidence this account -- which is both unsourced and gets Davies' first name wrong -- is accurate, the existence of another story should have been a red flag for CBS that they needed to be wary and make every possible effort to confirm his report. 

Apologizing for her report on CBS' This Morning, Logan said that the network had confirmed Davies' identity and that he had "was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack" and had used "U.S. government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story":

LOGAN: Well, we verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was, that he was working for the State Department at the time, that he was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack, and that, you know, he showed us -- he gave us access to communications he had with U.S. government officials. We used U.S. government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story, and everything checked out. He also showed us photographs that he had taken at the special mission compound the following morning and, you know, we take the vetting of sources and stories very seriously at60 Minutes. And we took it seriously in this case. But we were misled, and we were wrong, and that's the important thing. That's what we have to say here. We have to set the record straight and take responsibility.

But it's unclear what "government reports" they reviewed -- clearly not the incident report Davies' company had filed, of which she said she had not been aware, or the FBI report that reportedly corroborating it.

Those documents show Davies saying that he had never been to the Benghazi compound on the night of the attack, while the CBS segment and Davies' CBS-published book claim that he scaled the wall and knocked out a terrorist.

Nor is it clear how Davies' presence at the compound was "verified" -- did they seek out the other people in the story Davies tells and try to confirm his tale? 

Asked in a now-deleted CBSNews.com Q&A about why Davies (identified by CBS with the pseudonym "Morgan Jones") had decided to speak with the network, Logan said he "is tortured by guilt that he was not able to save his friends in the U.S. Compound."

"That may sound ridiculous to people who couldn't think of anything more insane than rushing towards a burning building that is overrun with al Qaeda terrorists," Logan continued, "but Morgan Jones is the kind of man who would do that and who did do that. And when he failed the first time, he went back again."

CBS News is now maintaining that they didn't think the story was too good to check. But it's clear that the effort they made was woefully insufficient.

UPDATE: It's worth pointing out that Logan made clear during her apology this morning is that one thing CBS News absolutely knew is that Davies had previously told a false story about his role in the Benghazi attack. From Logan's interview this morning with Norah O'Donnell:

O'DONNELL: But why would you stand by this report after Dylan Davies admitted lying to his own employer?

LOGAN: Because he was very upfront about that from the beginning, that was always part of his story. The context of it, when he tells his story, is that his boss is someone he cared about enormously. He cared about his American counterparts in the mission that night, and when his boss told him not to go, he couldn't stay back. So, that was always part of the record for us. And, that part didn't come as any surprise.

Logan says that she didn't know about the FBI report or the incident report - but she DID know that Davies had at some point lied about what happened that night.

That's another red flag that demands extensive corroboration and fact-checking, especially since Davies was hoping to make money off his story through a book and movie deal.

How To Lie About Benghazi And Almost Get Away With It

ARI RABIN-HAVT/Media Matters For America:

Wednesday morning, Benghazi whistleblower attorney Victoria Toensing appeared on Fox News' Fox & Friends as part of a long standing campaign among conservatives to discredit the findings of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) report on the Benghazi attacks, authored by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.

Toensing delivered what has become the standard conservative myth -- the claim that the ARB report was a "corrupt cover-up to protect Hillary Clinton." She asserted:

Because they were not thorough. There are all kinds of people they didn't interview. They made false statements and they framed four State Department employees to take the blame away from the higher-ups. They did not interview Hillary. They did not interview her top deputy for security, Pat Kennedy.

That is a lie. Pat Kennedy was interviewed by the ARB, a fact Pickering, one of the authors, has made clear. On May 12, Pickering explicitly told CNN's Candy Crowley, "We interviewed Pat Kennedy." This was also pointed out during the May 8, 2013 House Oversight hearing on Benghazi. Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) addressed the room, stating:

By the way, defend in statements that Undersecretary Kennedy was not interviewed by the ARB by Ambassador Pickering and Admiral Mullen. That is a misstatement of fact.  He most certainly was.  You can look it up.  It is documented.  He was interviewed, and he provided evidence. And that evidence was evaluated.

So it is not true that Undersecretary Kennedy was not part of that process.  He most certainly was, and I would ask Mr. Chairman that the record so reflect.

In fact, Fox News Host Greta Van Susteren tweeted out this exchange:

So why tell such a blatant lie?

Because Toensing thinks she can get away with it and the right needs to discredit the ARB. Prepared in the aftermath of the attacks on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, the report detailed more than two-dozen recommendations on improving security for our State Department personnel overseas. It did not cast blame on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama nor did it conform to the narrative conservatives and their allies on Capitol Hill -- namely Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) -- have been selling to the media about Benghazi.

Because both Pickering and Mullen are public servants with reputations beyond reproach, the right has had to work overtime trying to discredit their report.

The simplest way to attack the ARB is to claim their work was incomplete because they failed to interview specific witnesses.

And because the complete list of witnesses who spoke with the ARB remains classified, most often there is no way to respond to these accusations, unless a name was at sometime placed in the public record. Conservatives will continue to make claims about the ARB process, but without citations, the media should keep a watchful eye on which sources they trust.