Lara Logan was scheduled to deliver a report on Sunday's "60 Minutes" about disabled veterans who climb mountains. Instead, she appeared in front of the newsmagazine's trademark black backdrop and issued an apology.
Ms. Logan said that Dylan Davies, one of the main sources for a two-week-old piece about the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, had misled the program's staff when he gave an account of rushing to the compound the night the attack took place. "It was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry," Ms. Logan said.
The apology lasted only 90 seconds and revealed nothing new about why CBS had trusted Mr. Davies, who appeared on the program under the pseudonym Morgan Jones. Off-camera, CBS executives were left to wonder how viewers would react to the exceptionally rare correction.
While veteran television journalists spent the weekend debating whether the now-discredited Benghazi report would cause long-term damage to the esteemed newsmagazine's brand, some media critics joined the liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America in calling for CBS to initiate an independent investigation of missteps in the reporting process.
However, the apology was deemed inadequate by a wide range of commentators Sunday night. Craig Silverman, of the correction blog Regret the Error, predicted that it would not "take the heat off CBS News."
"Aside from the fact that it struck a very passive tone and pushed the responsibility onto the source, Dylan Davies, it said nothing about how the show failed to properly vet the story of an admitted liar," Mr. Silverman said in an email. "There are basic questions left unanswered about how the program checked out what Davies told them, and where this process failed."
"In the short term, this will confirm the worst suspicions of people who don't trust CBS News," said Paul Friedman, CBS's executive vice president for news until 2011. "In the long term, a lot will depend 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."
Ms. Logan has said that a year of reporting informed the Oct. 27 piece, which was Mr. Davies's first interview. Some of Ms. Logan's conclusions still hold up to scrutiny — for example, that "contrary to the White House's public statements, which were still being made a full week later, it's now well established that the Americans were attacked by Al Qaeda in a well-planned assault."
But enough doubts have been sown about Mr. Davies' account of being an eyewitness that CBS apologized on Friday, scrubbed the report from its site (and the "60 Minutes" Twitter feed) and prepared Ms. Logan's on-camera statement Sunday. (Mr. Davies's account included him hitting an Al Qaeda fighter in the face with the butt of a rifle and seeing the dead ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, at a hospital.)
Parallels have been drawn between this case and CBS's flawed 2004 report on President George W. Bush's time in the National Guard. Each time, the news division adopted a defensive crouch when advocates first started to question the stories. But the political backdrop has changed significantly this time. In 2004, there were accusations of "liberal bias" and unrelenting coverage of the controversy on conservative websites, driven by the right's long animus toward Dan Rather, the correspondent on the Bush report, and the implication that he was trying to hurt the president's re-election chances.
This time, conservatives initially trumpeted the "60 Minutes" report: the morning after it was broadcast, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News that he planned to block all administration nominations until Congress was granted access to all of the survivors of the attack. (On Sunday, Mr. Graham stood by his threat despite CBS's retraction.) At the same time, questions about Mr. Davies and his account were immediately raised, by both liberal activists and independent reporters.
Emmarie Huetteman contributed reporting.
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