Lara Logan Apologizes for ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Report: ‘We Were Wrong’
“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan apologized Friday for what CBS News is now acknowledging was a flawed report last month about the Benghazi attacks.
“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan apologized Friday for their report about the Benghazi attacks. (Image source: CBS News)
“The most important thing to every
person at ’60 Minutes’ is the truth, and today the truth is that we made
a mistake, and that’s very disappointing for any journalist, it’s very
disappointing for me,” Logan said on “CBS This Morning. “Nobody likes to
admit that they made a mistake, but if you do, you have to stand up and
take responsibility and you have to say you were wrong, and in this
case we were wrong.”
CBS and “60 Minutes” came under fire after their Oct. 27 report with security contractor Dylan Davies, who recalled dramatic details about the attacks in Libya last September that left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Davies, who appeared using the
pseudonym Morgan Jones, “worked for the State Department in Libya, he
was the manager of the local guard force at the Benghazi special mission
compound, and he described for us his actions that night, saying he had
entered the compound and he had a confrontation with one of the
attackers, and he also said that he’d seen the body of Ambassador Chris
Stevens in a local hospital,” Logan said Friday.
“We realized that we no longer had confidence in our source,” Logan said. (Image source: CBS News)
But days after the interview aired, The
Washington Post reported that Jones submitted an incident report to his
employer in which he said he was not actually at the compound the night of the attacks.
“He denied the report and he said he
told the FBI the same story that he told us, but what we now know is he
told the FBI a different story to what he told us,” Logan said. “That
was the moment for us that we realized that we no longer had confidence
in our source and that we were wrong to put him on air and we apologized
to our viewers.”
CBS initially stood by its report, and Logan attributed the attacks against it to the politics surrounding Benghazi. She told The New York Times: “We worked on this for a year. We killed ourselves not to allow politics into this report.”
Logan said Friday they verified that
Davies was who he said he was and used congressional testimony to verify
the details of his story.
“Everything checked out,” she said.
“We take the vetting of sources and stories very seriously at ’60
Minutes’ and we took it seriously in this case, but we were misled and
we were wrong and that’s the important thing, that’s what we have to say
here. We have to set the record straight and take responsibility.”
Logan said “60 Minutes” will apologize to viewers and officially correct the record during its broadcast Sunday.
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