Geee Posted November 29, 2013 Share Posted November 29, 2013 Mediaite: On Tuesday afternoon, CBS News announced that they had “asked” 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan to take a “leave of absence” and that she had “agreed” — i.e., she got suspended… indefinitely. So did her producer, Max McClellan, who also had a distinguished career at CBS News and worked on the story as the segment’s producer. But does the punishment fit the crime? Logan was the face of a politically charged and, as it turns out, inaccurate story the venerable newsmagazine show ran about Benghazi. Their reporting was based on the eyewitness account of 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. The story was retracted after The New York Times reported Davies had told his employer and the FBI that he never actually reached the compound at all that night. Once it became clear they had been duped, Logan publicly apologized for the mistake saying on CBS This Morning that “The most important thing to every person at 60 Minutes is the truth, and today, the truth is that we made a mistake,” she said, calling it a very “disappointing” situation. After all, what makes a show like 60 Minutes different from, say, a cable news show is that every word in the script is supposed to be heavily vetted by producers and lawyers alike. So on the scale of news screw-ups, this was pretty egregious. It wasn’t just an error — their entire report was based on what seems to have been a lie. Compounding the problem for CBS was that even after the report was first challenged (in the Washington Post), the show’s executive producer Jeff Fager publicly pronounced that he remained “proud” of it. For CBS News to maintain the reputation of 60 Minutes, they had to treat this with the utmost seriousness. But did they need to suspend Logan indefinitely? Does that mean she was responsible for one the greatest pocks on the reputation of the 45-year-old program, and not, say, her production staff, leading all the way to the top of CBS News? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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