#CBSNews #facing #calls for #investigation into #60Minutes #false #Benghazi #account Brace of #apologies for #broadcasting a false #eyewitness account of the 2012 Benghazi #attack has failed to quell mounting #furore #LaraLogan led the on-air apology. CBS 60 Minutes Lara Logan led the on-air apology. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP CBS News is facing mounting calls for an investigation into how its flagship programme 60 Minutes was #duped into running a #fantasy eyewitness account of the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi in which four #Americans, including the #US #ambassador #ChrisStevens, were #killed. Despite having broadcast two on-air apologies over the story – one on Friday and the second on Sunday night at the end of the weekly 60 Minutes slot – CBS has refused to order an investigation under the apparent belief that having apologised, the furore would now die down. But the opposite seems to be happening: criticism of the network is growing daily in an echo of the disastrous events of 2004 when CBS reacted defensively to the Dan Rather controversy over mistaken reporting of George W Bush’s Vietnam war record. The rising temperature of the controversy was underlined by prominent CBS alumni wading into the dispute. Former CBS news correspondent Marvin Kalb, writing in Politico , called for a “wide-ranging, no-holds-barred self-analysis of its reporting standards” following what he called “humiliating moment”. Paul Friedman, a senior news executive at CBS until 2011, told the New York Times that the long-term credibility of his old network depended on “how tough and transparent CBS can be in finding out how this happened — especially when there were not the kind of tight deadline pressures that sometimes result in errors.” In a statement, 60 Minutes maintained its defensive tone. A spokesman said: “As soon as we had confirmation of a problem with this report on Thursday, we issued a statement to that effect; we then went on the air Friday morning to address it, correct it and apologize, spoke at length to media outlets about the matter and now have explained it to our audience in a correction on our broadcast.” The Guardian asked CBS whether it intended to mount a full investigation into the debacle, but the spokesman declined to go further than the statement. The offending report by Lara Logan was broadcast on 27 October. It was focused around the account of “Morgan Jones” – real name Dylan Davies – a security guard with the British firm the Blue Mountain Group who claimed to have been present at the Benghazi attack and gave lurid descriptions to 60 Minutes of climbing up a 12ft wall, entering into combat with an assailant and later seeing Stevens’ body in hospital. Four days later, Davies’s story began to unravel when the Washington Post revealed that he had previously told his employer in an official incident report that he had been nowhere near the US compound on the night of the attacks. The chairman of CBS News, Jeff Fager, stood by the 60 Minutes story even after it became public that Davies had given two conflicting accounts of the night. The network only abandoned its bullish position after the New York Times disclosed that Davies had also told the FBI that he had not been present at the Benghazi attack. In her first apology last Friday, Logan admitted that she had known before the broadcast that Davies had lied about part of his story. Speaking on CBS This Morning, Logan said Davies did so in order to protect himself – as to have been at the Benghazi compound would have been to have disregarded orders. Logan said she had decided to go ahead with the report because she believed that Davies had acted out of an altruistic desire to help other guards in danger. The chorus of complaint over CBS’s handling of the affair includes experts in journalism ethics and media watchdog groups. Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University and has been writing about the CBS controversy on his Press Think blog, said that CBS’s responses had been “inexplicable”. Having been through the trauma of 2004, the network was making the same mistakes by refusing to answer basic questions on what had happened. “What’s the big deal about saying you are investigating the matter? I don’t understand what’s so hard about that: it should be routine,” Rosen said. Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard university, told the Guardian that the Sunday-night apology was “the least of mea culpas for what was a real reporting debacle. 60 Minutes is very high-profile and it gave the Benghazi report a lot of attention - so I think they have more of a problem than just saying sorry.” Media Matters, a left-of-center media watchdog that has pursued the Benghazi story doggedly, has demanded an independent investigation into the 60 Minutes report along the same lines of the investigation into Dan Rather’s reporting of Bush’s National Guard record. On that occasion a former governor of Pennsylvania and a retired CEO of the Associated Press were given the job of looking into the flawed report for which Rather lost his show and eventually departed CBS in 2006. Further controversy surrounds the role of Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster that is also owned by CBS that published Davies’ account of Benghazi two days after the 60 Minutes broadcast. The book has now been recalled, but questions remain about which outlet – the publisher or 60 Minutes – made contact with Davies first, and whether there was any financial incentive within CBS to go ahead with the broadcast in order to advance the book. theguardian/media/2013/nov/11/cbs-news-60-minutes-benghazi-investigation?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-3%20Main%20trailblock:Network%20front%20-%20main%20trailblock:Position13
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 08:51:39 +0000
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