The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone with the scoop:
Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of ‘“60 Minutes,” informed staff Tuesday that Lara Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, would be taking a leave of absence following an internal report on the newsmagazine’s discredited Oct. 27 Benghazi report.
Two weeks ago, Logan apologized to viewers for the piece, saying that “the truth is that we made a mistake.” The report in question, since retracted by CBS, centered on the disputed account of Dylan Davies, a British security contractor who claimed he was at the U.S. consulate in Libya on the night it was attacked last year. After the program aired, the New York Times and others discovered a number of contradictions between the account Davies gave to CBS and the one he gave to the FBI and his employer—inconsistencies that CBS now concedes they should have been aware of before the 60 Minutes piece aired.
“There is a lot to learn from this mistake for the entire organization,” CBS News chairman Jeff Fage told staff in a memo today. “We have rebuilt CBS News in a way that has dramatically improved our reporting abilities. Ironically 60 Minutes, which has been a model for those changes, fell short by broadcasting a now discredited account of an important story, and did not take full advantage of the reporting abilities of CBS News that might have prevented it from happening.”
No word on how long Logan and McClellan will be on the bench.
