Lara Logan Leave Of Absence

Lara Logan Leave Of Absence, “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan will take a leave of absence from the CBS show, CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager said Tuesday,  after the show’s Oct. 27 segment on the Benghazi attacks collapsed under inconsistencies in the testimony of a central interviewee on the program.  Max McClellan, who produced the investigation, will also be taking leave.

Fager said in a memo, “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.”

After the story’s problems came to light, CBS commissioned an internal review to look into the network’s failings. The review discovered that Logan and her colleagues ignored several red flags in their reporting. According to a summary of findings, Al Ortiz, CBS News’s executive director of standards and practices, found that the “wider reporting resources of CBS News were not unleashed to determine the credibility of a key part of the broadcast — a security contractor in Benghazi named Dylan Davies, who told Logan that on the night of the attack — Sept. 11, 2012 — he had been on the ground for the clash with terrorists.

” Davies said that he’d pounded a terrorist with the butt of his rifle and had seen the slain U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, in a Benghazi hospital.

It turns out Davies told something far different to his own supervisors — that he never made it to the compound and was forced to kick around in his beachfront villa that night. He also told the FBI an account that conflicted with his “60 Minutes” testimony.