CBS News has suffered another black eye, this time over Lara Logan’s “60 Minutes” report on Benghazi last month.
As the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik puts it, “This is not as bad as Dan Rather’s unconfirmed report about the the military service of George W. Bush that came to be known as Memogate. But it’s bad, because ’60 Minutes,’ the most successful show in the history of TV, is the program that makes all the other failures at CBS News acceptable.”
On “CBS This Morning,” Logan apologized for her report, saying “we were misled and we were wrong.” She discussed how seriously the program takes the vetting of sources for stories.
Her boss, CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager — who doubles as Executive Producer of “60 Minutes” — has spoken with pride of the news division’s accuracy.
“We weren’t always first, but we were accurate and comprehensive,” Fager said in June 2012 , praising his network’s coverage of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado and the Supreme Court decision on President Obama’s healthcare law in the face of competitors at CNN, Fox News, and ABC who bungled those stories.
On the show he runs, “60 Minutes,” Fager was more emphatic: “How intense the process is at ’60 Minutes,’ how much we care about every line, about every interview, about not taking people out of context.”
“60 Minutes” will apologize to viewers and will correct the record Sunday night.