US '60 Minutes' Star, Lara Logan, Given Leave Over Benghazi Report

Lara Logan was lead correspondent on 60 Minutes' false Benghazi Story.

US '60 Minutes' star given leave over Benghazi report (via AFP)

CBS News on Tuesday put a correspondent for flagship program "60 Minutes" on leave over flaws in a critical report about last year's attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Lara Logan, a South African, also abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance…

Was 60 Minutes' Fraudulent Benghazi Story A CBS "Hit" On President Obama?: Husband of Correspondent A Former Propagandist for a PR Firm - Questions On If He 'Assisted' on Benghazi Story

Newsweek contributing editor Jeff Stein is raising questions about whether 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan's husband -- a former employee of a firm that planted "pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005" -- was involved in the show's now-retracted Benghazi report.

Lara Logan: lead correspondent on 60 Minutes' discredited Benghazi Story.

Stein explains that Burkett is "a former Army sergeant and onetime employee of a private intelligence outfit hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005." The Lincoln Group, Burkett's former employer, apparently specialized in producing videos and phony news clips that they would then feed to media outlets, "making them appear as originating from legitimate news organizations."

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Disinfo Wars: Alex Jones’ War on Your Mind

Jones' sensationalist tactics has consistently caused more damage than good to legitimate movements that stand in opposition to government repression and big media propaganda. When powerful people and big media want to "delegitimize" a belief or a movement, they need only suggest that Jones is associated with it.

Alex Jones. (Caricature: DonkeyHote)

Jones’ ability and pattern of delegitimizing controversial, yet evidence-based contingents of so-called truth movements through radicalization and guilt by association, is eerily analogous to the blueprints of various US Government programs– most notably COINTELPRO from the 1960s and ‘70s. More recently, this has also been the case regarding establishment efforts to discredit the Occupy Wall St. Movement. This article will explore the work of Alex Jones’ and the effects he has had on others who research similar controversial subjects, and how research into those very subjects comes to be viewed in the public once Jones is perceived as a spokesperson or figurehead.

by Nolan Higdon
In 1833, William Miller predicted the second coming of Jesus Christ in the year 1843. Only after his fourth failed prediction, each of which saw hundreds of thousands of followers turn out, did his followers abandon him. By this time, Miller had already absconded with copious amounts of their money, spent on his publications and for ascension robes that were supposed to prepare them for Jesus Christ’s arrival.1 A profiteer relying on distortion and unfulfilled predictions, contemporary radio personality and activist Alex Jones operates in the same mode as Miller. Instead of ascension robes, Jones profits from the fear and uncertainty he relentlessly peddles via DVDs, publications, books, a TV show, a radio show, and websites.

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60 Minutes and Benghazi: When a Hoax Sounds Like a Hoax

The fact their main witness had written a book about the Benghazi embassy attack for by a conservative book publisher should have raised red flags for 60 Minutes.  And the fact the witness claimed to have "sneaked" into an al-Qaeda controlled hospital should have
raised in more questions.


By Peter Hart
60 Minutes retracted its report about Benghazi, after documents surfaced that cast doubt on the reliability of their key source. But his story was dubious from the start.

Media reporters and critics are devoting enormous space to a 60 Minutes report about Benghazi that has been retracted. The program explained that new documents contradict one of their main sources. But even without those documents, CBS should have suspected they were being hoaxed.

Lara Logan, CBS' correspondent for the hoaxed story.

On November 10, 60 Minutes aired an unusual correction: It was no longer standing by their October 27 report about the attack on a US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. The segment has been disappeared from the CBS website–a dramatic step, for sure, and one that makes the brief correction that appeared at the end of the show all the more unusual.

On the new broadcast, correspondent Lara Logan explained that one of the main sources, a security contractor named Dylan Davies, gave an account that CBS could no longer trust to be accurate.

But why did they believe him in the first place? Davies' story–which he also told in a book published by Threshold, a conservative imprint of CBS-owned Simon & Schuster–should have raised some red flags. Here's part of the CBS segment, where Davies is identified as Morgan Jones:

LOGAN: On a night he describes as sheer hell, Morgan Jones snuck into a Benghazi hospital that was under the control of Al-Qaeda terrorists, desperate to find out if one of his close friends from the US Special Mission was the American he'd been told was
there.

JONES: I was dreading seeing who it was, you know?

LOGAN: Mm-hm.

JONES: And it didn't take long to get to the–to the room. And I could see in through
the–through the glass. And I didn't even have to go into the room to see who it was. I knew who it was immediately.

LOGAN: Who was it?

JONES: It was the ambassador, dead.

So he sneaked into an Al-Qaeda controlled hospital and immediately found Stevens' body. Did this not strike CBS as dubious? If not that part, then surely this part of the interview would raise some red flags: 

LOGAN: Not long afterwards, Morgan Jones scaled the 12-foot high wall of the compound that was still overrun with Al-Qaeda fighters.

JONES: One guy saw me. He's–he just shouted. I couldn't believe that he'd seen me, because it was so dark, and he started walking towards me.

LOGAN: And as he was coming closer?

JONES: As I got closer, I just hit him with the butt of the rifle in the face.

LOGAN: And?

JONES: Oh, he went down, yeah.

LOGAN: He dropped?

JONES: Yeah, like–like a stone.

LOGAN: With his face smashed in?

JONES: Hm. Yeah.

LOGAN: And no one saw you do it?

JONES: No.

LOGAN: Or heard it?

JONES: No, there was too much noise.

A skeptical interviewer might start to wonder about this person's account, since it is, well, unbelievable.

One of the most significant challenges to the story came when the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung (10/31/13) reported that Davies seemed to have told a different story: 

"But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

"In Davies' 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 beachside 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' 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."

Evidently CBS was unaware of these documents–despite the fact that they initially defended their reporting by claiming they'd spent one year reporting the story.

The corporate media have been unusually dogged in pursuing the Benghazi story–which has been pushed by right-wing media and several Republican politicians. The level of attention has always been hard to figure out, but it seems to center on the fact that some Republicans believe that the Obama administration misled the country about who exactly attacked the US facility. The White House had initially raised the issue of an anti-Islam video being the motivation for the attacks, which some thought was  a coverup, since they contend the attack was actually a carefully orchestrated assault by Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

Lara Logan (left) and Davies. CBS provided Davies a global platform for his lies.

The controversy has been blown wildly out of proportion; as I noted (FAIR Blog, 10/17/12), there were contemporaneous media accounts from the scene of the attack where some of those involved declared they were furious about this video.

In any event, the White House was not linking the video to the attack for very long, so as coverups go, it was never a very good one.  But Benghazi continues to be an obsession on the right; it's entirely possible that the drive to report "what really happened" led CBS to believe an unbelievable story. In the wake of the Benghazi attack, Logan gave a speech that included an impassioned call for a US military response (which was noted by Democracy Now! on November 11): "I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors, who are going to exact revenge." So it seems possible that Logan's dedication to that particular cause may have impacted her judgment.

Her brief apology struck many observers as insufficient. Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone  (11/11/13) wrote, "Sunday's brief acknowledgment didn't resemble a news program seriously trying to get to the bottom of how it got duped."

Indeed, there are important questions to ask about how CBS mishandled the criticism of the story, and the segment itself.

But on some level the answer is quite straightforward: An unbelievable account of a dramatic event is probably unbelievable for a reason.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Governor Christie: Given 'Free Ride' by Big Media Because He's 'Entertaining' - Meanwhile His Right-Wing Policies Are Ignored

The November 18 cover of Time magazine about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie caused a stir because of this line of text: "The Elephant in the Room." Many saw that as a swipe at Christie's weight, as well as a feeble pun about Republicans. But the bigger problem with the Time piece, as with so much of the coverage of Christie, is more fundamental: The real elephant in the room is that Christie has an actual record of governing a state, and yet journalists seem almost totally uninterested in discussing it.

Media Advisory: FAIR
There is no doubt that Christie is a media darling (Extra!, 5/11). On Meet the Press (11/10/13), Time's Mark Halperin said:

"Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical, like our last three presidents. People like having them on TV. He's a good talker. He won."

The actual Time article, while not crediting Christie with magical powers, presented him in glowing terms. Christie "has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore," Michael Scherer writes. "He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done."

To Time, the Christie story that matters is how he can get the conservative base of the Republican Party to support him. Pushing the major political parties to the "center" is a well-worn, bipartisan media pattern; it's what caused much of the press enthusiasm for John McCain in 2000 and 2008 (Extra!, 7/08). But as Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (11/11/13) wrote, "The more the news media and the establishment cheer on Mr. Christie, the more grassroots activists--especially members of the Tea Party--resent it."

This framing prioritizes criticism of Christie from the right. As Time put it:

"Like McCain and Romney before him, Christie is wide open to attack from his right. He opposes gay marriage, but in October he called off a legal fight to block same-sex unions in New Jersey, earning the ire of Christian conservatives who promptly complained of "serious" concerns about Christie's 'reliability.'"

So Christie, after successfully blocking marriage equality in New Jersey for years with his veto, eventually gave up what increasingly appeared to be an unwinnable legal battle--that's what Time means by Christie being "wide open to attack from his right."

But what about other policy outcomes in the state Christie governs? Christie made the rounds of the Sunday chat shows on November 10 after winning a landslide election, as seemingly every journalist made clear. But the journalists avoided Christie's record as governor, instead focusing squarely on whether Christie is right-wing enough to win the Republican presidential nomination. "Can you play in places like Iowa and South Carolina?" asked ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos.
On NBC's Meet the Press, David Gregory wondered: "Mitt Romney told me here last week that you could save the Republican Party. Does it need saving and are you the guy to save it?"

(Photo: Bob Jagendor)

Gregory did at one point mention an actual policy issue, noting that the Wall Street Journal editorial page had deemed Christie's economic record "the biggest area of disappointment." But that was the exception, despite the fact that there's plenty to examine.

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike (10/30/13) wrote one of the few pieces that focused on Christie's actual record. She noted that Christie, who won election in 2009 attacking Democrat Jon Corzine's budget gimmicks,

"has relied on the same kind of short-term strategies, diverting money for things like affordable housing and property tax rebates to balance the budget, and tapping funds intended for development of new sources of energy to keep the lights on in state buildings."

Zernike added that

"Christie has issued more debt for transportation projects than any of his predecessors. Overall spending has risen 14 percent, and while state surpluses nationwide are growing, New Jersey's has shrunk to its lowest percentage in a decade. The state's bond rating is among the worst in the country."

And while Christie touted the state's private-sector jobs record on all of the Sunday shows, none of the reporters interviewing him thought to bring up the state's dismal jobs performance Compared to other states, New Jersey ranks near the bottom--with the 41st highest unemployment rate, and the 44th worst job growth record (Daily Beast, 11/11/13).

As media portrayals stick with the "moderate" storyline, The Nation's John Nichols (6/3/13) had a different, more factually based analysis:

"Christie is no moderate. He's a social conservative who opposes reproductive rights, has defunded Planned Parenthood and has repeatedly rejected attempts to restore state funding for family planning centers. He has vetoed money for clinics that provide health screenings for women, including mammograms and pap smears. He vetoed marriage equality.

(Photo: Bob Jagendor)

"Christie's consistent when it comes to reading from the right's playbook. The governor announced early in his tenure that he was pulling New Jersey out of a regional carbon emissions reduction program, and then declared his intention to scale back the state's renewable energy targets."

Christie, Nichols added, has a record very much like controversial Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker:

"Christie is at his most militant when it comes to implementing the austerity agenda associated with the most conservative Republican governors. There's a credible case to be made that he is 'doing a Scott Walker on New Jersey,' as a Garden State headline suggested in early May, after the governor proposed gutting civil service protections. Christie makes no bones about his admiration for the Wisconsin governor, whose anti-labor crusade inspired mass protests, a recall attempt and miserable job-creation numbers."

But those serious issues remain off the corporate media radar as they lavish praise on the supposedly straight-talking, bipartisan Republican governor. "There is no doubt that Christie's personality is the dominant feature of his political style," as Washington Post reporter Dan Balz  (11/4/13) put it. The same goes for the way media are covering Christie--which is surely exactly the way he likes it.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.