"60 Minutes" issues apology about Benghazi report 
 
 (CBS News) "60 Minutes" has learned of new information that undercuts its Oct. 27 account of an ex-security officer who called himself Morgan Jones. 
 
 His real name is Dylan Davies, and he recounted to Lara Logan, in great detail, what he claimed were his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound. 
 
 "The most important thing to every person at '60 Minutes' is the truth, and today the truth is we made a mistake," Logan said on "CBS This Morning." "That's very disappointing for any journalist, it's very disappointing for me. Nobody likes to admit they made a mistake, but if you do, you have to stand up and take responsibility and you have to say that you are wrong. And in this case, we were wrong. We made a mistake. 
 
 "And, how did this happen? Dylan Davies 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 that he had entered the compound and had a confrontation with one of the attackers and he also said that he had seen the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens in a local hospital. And after our report aired, questions were raised about whether his account was real after an incident report surfaced that told a different story about what he'd done that night." 
 
 Logan continued, "He denied that report and he said that he told the FBI the same story he told us, but what we now know is that he told the FBI a different story to what he told us and you know, that was the moment, for us, when we realized that we no longer had confidence in our source and that we were wrong to put him on air and we apologize to our viewers." 
 
 Asked why she was convinced Davies was a credible source and that the account he provided was accurate, Logan said, "We verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was, that he was working for the State Department at the time, that he was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack, and that he showed us, he gave us access to communications he had with U.S. government officials. We used U.S. government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story and everything checked out. He also showed us photographs that he had taken at the special mission compound the following morning, and you know, 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. 
 
 Last Thursday, the Washington Post ran a report that questioned the central parts of what Davies had told Logan, citing an incident report right after the attack that he gave to Blue Mountain, the security firm he worked for. He told them that he never made it to the compound, that he was at his villa there. 
 
 "We did not know about that incident report before we did our story," Logan said. "When the Washington Post story came out, he denied it. He said that he never wrote it, had nothing to do with it and that he told the FBI the same story he told us. But as we now know, that is not the case." 
 
 Asked why she continued to believe Davies after he admitted lying to his own employer, Logan said, "Because he was very up front about that from the beginning, that was always part of his story. And it -- the context of it, when he tells his story is that his boss is someone he cared about enormously. He cared about his American counterparts in the mission that night, and when his boss told him not to go, he couldn't stay back. So that was always part of the record for us. And that part didn't come as any surprise." 
 
 "60 Minutes" has already acknowledged it was a mistake not to disclose that a book Davies co-wrote about the attack was being published by Simon & Schuster, which is a CBS company. On Friday afternoon, Threshold Editions, the imprint under which the book was published, announced that it has withdrawn the book from publication and sale. 
 
 There are also reports that Davies was asking for money. Asked if he ever asked for money, Logan said, "He did not. He never asked us for money. It never came up." 
 
 Moving forward, Logan said there will be a report on "60 Minutes" Sunday in which they'll correct the record. 
 
 Logan said "60 Minutes" has not been in touch with Davies since the report. "After we learned of the latest news about the FBI report, we tried to contact him, but haven't heard back from him," she said. ||||| The fallout continues over at CBS News. Following multiple on-air apologies for a faulty 60 Minutes report, veteran broadcaster Lara Logan has taken an immediate leave of absence from the venerable news magazine -- alongside producer Max McClellan. 
 
 
 
 CBS News chief Jeff Fager announced the news today in a staff memo, following an internal "journalistic review" from CBS standards and practices that determined the series' Oct. 27 report about the 2012 attack of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was not properly vetted. It's the latest development since the network made the decision to retract the story, which relied heavily on misinformation from a source and supposed witness to the events, Dylan Davies. 
 
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 Holes in Davies' story were first pointed out by an FBI report that contradicted his statements. "As soon as we learned about the FBI report, we knew right away. All of us. There wasn't any debate about it," Fager told The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of the retraction. "He deceived us. He works very hard at his deception. There are a lot of people out there who try to deceive reporters. And I think we're really good at finding it. We worked this one hard." 
 
 
 
 Fager's Nov. 26 memo, pasted in full below, notes that he asked Logan and McClellan to take a leave absence and told staffers that he's making adjustments at 60 Minutes to reduce the chances of anything similar happening again. Outwardly, a CBS News spokesperson issued the following statement: "The 60 Minutes journalistic review is concluded, and we are implementing ongoing changes based on its results." 
 
 
 
 No details were given on the possible duration for Logan's leave. She has served as CBS News' chief foreign affairs correspondent since 2006. 
 
 
 
 Read both the review from CBS News' Standards and Practices and the Fager memo below: 
 
 
 
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 November 26, 2013 
 
 
 
 
 
 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS 
 
 My review found that the Benghazi story aired by 60 Minutes on October 27 was deficient in several respects: 
 
 --From the start, Lara Logan and her producing team were looking for a different angle to the story of the Benghazi attack. They believed they found it in the story of Dylan Davies, written under the pseudonym, “Morgan Jones”. It purported to be the first western eyewitness account of the attack. But Logan’s report went to air without 60 Minutes knowing what Davies had told the FBI and the State Department about his own activities and location on the night of the attack. 
 
 --The fact that the FBI and the State Department had information that differed from the account Davies gave to 60 Minutes was knowable before the piece aired. But the wider reporting resources of CBS News were not employed in an effort to confirm his account. It’s possible that reporters and producers with better access to inside FBI sources could have found out that Davies had given varying and conflicting accounts of his story. 
 
 --Members of the 60 Minutes reporting team conducted interviews with Davies and other individuals in his book, including the doctor who received and treated Ambassador Stevens at the Benghazi hospital. They went to Davies’ employer Blue Mountain, the State Department, the FBI (which had interviewed Davies), and other government agencies to ask about their investigations into the attack. Logan and producer Max McClellan told me they found no reason to doubt Davies’ account and found no holes in his story. But the team did not sufficiently vet Davies’ account of his own actions and whereabouts that night. 
 
 --Davies told 60 Minutes that he had lied to his own employer that night about his location, telling Blue Mountain that he was staying at his villa, as his superior ordered him to do, but telling 60 Minutes that he then defied that order and went to the compound. This crucial point – his admission that he had not told his employer the truth about his own actions – should have been a red flag in the editorial vetting process. 
 
 --After the story aired, the Washington Post reported the existence of a so-called “incident report” that had been prepared by Davies for Blue Mountain in which he reportedly said he spent most of the night at his villa, and had not gone to the hospital or the mission compound. Reached by phone, Davies told the 60 Minutes team that he had not written the incident report, disavowed any knowledge of it, and insisted that the account he gave 60 Minutes was word for word what he had told the FBI. Based on that information and the strong conviction expressed by the team about their story, Jeff Fager defended the story and the reporting to the press. 
 
 --On November 7, the New York Times informed Fager that the FBI’s version of Davies’ story differed from what he had told 60 Minutes. Within hours, CBS News was able to confirm that in the FBI’s account of their interview, Davies was not at the hospital or the mission compound the night of the attack. 60 Minutes announced that a correction would be made, that the broadcast had been misled, and that it was a mistake to include Davies in the story. Later a State Department source also told CBS News that Davies had stayed at his villa that night and had not witnessed the attack. 
 
 --Questions have been raised about the recent pictures from the compound which were displayed at the end of the report, including a picture of Ambassador Stevens’ schedule for the day after the attack. Video taken by the producer-cameraman whom the 60 Minutes team sent to the Benghazi compound last month clearly shows that the pictures of the Technical Operations Center were authentic, including the picture of the schedule in the debris. 
 
 --Questions have also been raised about the role of Al Qaeda in the attack since Logan declared in the report that Al Qaeda fighters had carried it out. Al Qaeda’s role is the subject of much disagreement and debate. While Logan had multiple sources and good reasons to have confidence in them, her assertions that Al Qaeda carried out the attack and controlled the hospital were not adequately attributed in her report. 
 
 --In October of 2012, one month before starting work on the Benghazi story, Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the US Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the US should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story. 
 
 --The book, written by Davies and a co-author, was published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS Corporation. 60 Minutes erred in not disclosing that connection in the segment. 
 
 Al Ortiz 
 
 Executive Director of Standards and Practices 
 
 CBS News 
 
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 By now most of you have received the report from Al Ortiz about the problems with the 60 Minutes story on Benghazi. 
 
 There is a lot to learn from this mistake for the entire organization. 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. 
 
 As a result, I have asked Lara Logan, who has distinguished herself and has put herself in harm’s way many times in the course of covering stories for us, to take a leave of absence, which she has agreed to do. I have asked the same of producer Max McClellan, who also has a distinguished career at CBS News. 
 
 As Executive Producer, I am responsible for what gets on the air. I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have. 
 
 When faced with a such an error, we must use it as an opportunity to make our broadcast even stronger. We are making adjustments at 60 Minutes to reduce the chances of it happening again. 
 
 There is a lot of pride at CBS News. Every broadcast is working hard to live up to the high standard set at CBS News for excellence in reporting. This was a regrettable mistake. But there are many fine professionals at 60 Minutes who produce some of the very best of broadcast journalism, covering the important and interesting stories of our times, and they will continue to do so each and every Sunday. 
 
 Jeff Fager 
 
 Chairman, CBS News 
 
 Executive Producer, 60 Minutes ||||| A lying source, a failure to properly vet him, and critical information that turned out to be unsupportable. 
 
 That appears to be the core of the “60 Minutes” Benghazi debacle that led to an on-air apology from correspondent Lara Logan and will be followed by another one on tonight’s broadcast. 
 
 It’s also a summary of events that could easily apply to the famed and discredited 2004 Bush National Guard records story aired by “60 Minutes II” just before that year’s presidential election. 
 
 The two incidents share some core characteristics, but they also differ in interesting ways. That they both happened at the same news organization — and under the “60 Minutes” banner — is notable in itself. 
 
 What’s Similar 
 
 Failure of a key source. Both times, there was a single source that set off the key reporting. In the Benghazi example, the show needed to verify that Dylan Davies is who he says he is and did the job in Libya he says he did. Then they needed to dig into his story about the attack and try to poke holes in it, or see if it could stand up. 
 
 With the National Guard story, there was a a single source, Bill Burkett, who provided documents that were the basis of the report. 
 
 Again, there is the matter of the source, Burkett, and the content he provided. 
 
 In both cases, the sources came with serious baggage, and the content they provided was even more dubious. 
 
 Not checking the source. Among a list of critical mistakes made back in 2004, the independent report commissioned by CBS News cited “The failure of 60 Minutes Wednesday management to scrutinize the publicly available, and at times controversial, background of the source of the documents, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett.” 
 
 With Davies, “60 Minutes” did some looking into their key source. 
 
 “We verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was,” Logan said this week. 
 
 They had the right guy in that he had worked where he said he did. But there’s one particularly troubling aspect of Davies: he is an admitted liar. (He was also a source who wanted money for his story, according to Fox News’ Adam Housley.) 
 
 Davies had set himself up well to fool “60 Minutes,” too. He knew that they could go to his employer and possibly get information from them about what happened the night of the attack, and whether Davies was at the compound as he claimed. 
 
 So he told CBS News that he’d lied to his employer. It seemed to make the folks at the broadcast think he was trustworthy for having told them he’d lied before. 
 
 “Always part of his narrative to us from the beginning was, ‘I told my boss that I didn’t go and I did,’” CBS News chairman and executive producer of “60 Minutes” Jeff Fager told Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post. 
 
 Then there was the question of the FBI, who had interviewed Davies after the fact about what happened that night. Perhaps Davies assumed the FBI wouldn’t just hand over details of that discussion to “60 Minutes” in order to help them check his story. Maybe he took a chance that “60 Minutes” would not ask the FBI. (Read Dylan Byers in Politico for a look at this FBI aspect.) 
 
 Or maybe his lies had gotten him far enough that he wasn’t making these kind of calculations anymore. After all, he had a book coming out that needed promoting… 
 
 Bottom line: If you have a source who tells you he is a liar, you better not think he won’t lie to you. Bulletproof everything he says. And if there are pieces you can’t confirm, you stack that up against the fact that he is a liar. 
 
 Not checking the information. “We spent more than a year reporting our story about the attack on Benghazi, which aired on Oct. 27, speaking with close to 100 sources in the process,” Fager told Calderone. 
 
 Great. But did they see the FBI interview with Davies? No. Did they get the incident report filed with his employer? The answer also appears to be no. What about other people at the compound that night? Did anyone say they saw him there? No, because no one could have. 
 
 Talking to 100 people is great. But none of them had the information needed to verify Davies’ story. Or “60 Minutes” was asking the wrong questions. 
 
 
 
 Here are two similar problems highlighted in the commissioned report about what happened in 2004: 
 
 “The failure to find and interview the individual who was understood at the outset to be Lieutenant Colonel Burkett’s source of the Killian documents, and thus to establish the chain of custody; 
 
 “The failure to interview a range of former National Guardsmen who served with Lieutenant Colonel Killian and who had different perspectives about the documents”. 
 
 The “60 Minutes II” team did send the documents out to experts for independent verification. But they failed to “obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents from any document examiner …”. 
 
 Circling the wagons. The response came quickly both in 2004 and this week: we stand by our reporting. 
 
 In the wake of reports that raised serious questions about Davies’ story, Fager told The Huffington Post they were “proud” of the piece, and stood by their sources. 
 
 It was even more so back in 2004. They held firm and rebutted criticisms on the “Evening News”. 
 
 For a full accounting of CBS News’ initial refusal to respond to the criticism this time, read Jay Rosen’s post from today, “Will CBS News apologize for the reckless denials before its Benghazi story collapsed?” 
 
 No internal accountability. Back in 2004, CBS News had no ombudsman, no internal watchdog that reported publicly. For a while, following a recommendation from the independent review of Rathergate, CBS ran a nice blog called CBS Public Eye. It aimed to bring transparency to the news operation, and a measure of accountability. It was killed off less than three years later. 
 
 As a result, there is no one at CBS News charged with getting answers to the most important questions, or anyone who can reasonably force the “60 Minutes” folks to address them. Fager has done some interviews, but he has not answered questions such as why the program wasn’t able to check what Davies was telling them against what he’d told his employer and the FBI. 
 
 What’s Different 
 
 Speed. The cycle was faster this time — less than a week from airing to apology. 
 
 In 2004, Dan Rather and CBS News president Andrew Heyward didn’t apologize until 12 days after the “60 Minutes II” story first aired. (Rather’s statement is here.) 
 
 Another element of speed was that the “60 Minutes II” report aired not long after the reporting team gained possession of the Killian documents. 
 
 That segment was rushed to air, as noted in the independent review of the debacle. It cited one major problem as, “The failure to have a vetting process capable of dealing effectively with the production speed, significance and sensitivity of the Segment.” 
 
 So, in 2004, CBS News rushed the segment to air, but dragged its feet — and made many inaccurate and misleading statements — when questions were raised. 
 
 This time, according to Fager, they took their time with the piece. (Remember: “We spent more than a year reporting our story about the attack on Benghazi, which aired on Oct. 27, speaking with close to 100 sources in the process.”) 
 
 More time for reporting, but same result… 
 
 So, what made CBS News brass admit their mistakes faster? I think two factors played a role: 
 
 1. The big pushback came from media peers. Yes, Media Matters was on the story right away, and that’s somewhat similar to the kind of partisan criticism that occurred with the National Guard story. But this time the big blows came swiftly from two established news organizations: The Washington Post and The New York Times. If you’re Jeff Fager, the head of CBS News, and you see two major organizations like that punching big holes in your story, you don’t have much of a choice. 
 
 2. The elements in dispute were easier to check. The Killian documents required areas of expertise that are typically not present on a newsroom: signature analysis, document authentication, etc. In 2004, the CBS News view was: “You have your experts (on some silly blog), and we have ours.” This time, The New York Times reported that the FBI interview with Davies was not consistent with what he told “60 Minutes,” and inside CBS News, jaws drop. As Fager said: “So I think that, for us, that was the moment — and that was the moment we turned instantly. It wasn’t like we had a big debate about it. That for us said it all. We fully expected the FBI report would coincide with what he told us.” 
 
 Corporate tie-in. Davies’ book was being published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster, a subsidiary of CBS. It’s common these days to see “60 Minutes” and other CBS programs give attention to upcoming titles from its sister company. 
 
 Do you get on “60 Minutes” just because your book is with S&S? No. But it helps, and there is usually a basic (if not more specific) effort to make connections so that CBS programs can have a good crack at S&S authors. 
 
 A major problem with the story is that the original broadcast did not mention the corporate tie-in. This is another thing “60 Minutes” has had to apologize for. 
 
 The 2004 story had no such element. 
 
 The lack of disclosure in the broadcast plus the inadequate nature of the vetting done by “60 Minutes” creates the impression that, in spite of a year of reporting with 100 sources, this story was sloppily done in several ways. 
 
 What Remains 
 
 Tonight, we get another apology on the program. Will it detail efforts made to get information from the FBI? Will it explain how Davies was vetted, and where that process fell down? Will it explain why the network brushed off legitimate concerns before The New York Times report? And on and on… 
 
 There remain many unanswered questions. You have to be skeptical that “60 Minutes” itself is going to be the ones to ask and answer them after having thus far avoided them. 
 
 The clock is ticking… 
 
 Related: Mapes: Decision to Air National Guard Story Was Made by CBS Superiors, Including Heyward
– Sure enough, CBS is disowning 60 Minutes' recent Benghazi story, in the wake of an FBI report that discredited its key source. "The truth is we made a mistake," Lara Logan said on CBS This Morning. Logan explained that they'd believed former security officer Dylan Davies (aka Morgan Jones), because they'd verified that he was working for the State Department in Benghazi when the attack hit. "We take the vetting of sources and stories very seriously," Logain said, "but we were misled." When the Washington Post first raised questions about Davies last week, Logan stood by him. "He never had two stories. He only had one story," she told the New York Times. Today she explained: "He was very up front about [lying to his employer] from the beginning, that was always part of his story. And it—the context of it, when he tells his story is that his boss is someone he cared about enormously. He cared about his American counterparts in the mission that night, and when his boss told him not to go, he couldn't stay back. So that was always part of the record for us. And that part didn't come as any surprise." But the recent revelations about Davies' FBI interview did.