60 Minutes apologizes for controversial story on Benghazi

Today’s Huffington Post reports that in a humiliating retreat from a piece she had staunchly defended, “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan admitted on Friday morning that she and the news magazine had made a “mistake” in their reporting of a controversial story about the Benghazi attacks. She apologized to viewers and said “60 Minutes” will issue a correction about the reliability of one of her key sources, security contractor Dylan Davies, on its next program.

“We were wrong to put him on air,” she said, adding, “We will apologize to our viewers and we will correct the record on our broadcast on Sunday night.”

It emerged on Thursday that Davies, who gave Logan a hair-raising, detailed account of his actions during the 2012 attack, had previously told the FBI that he hadn’t even gone to the site where it took place. This was the second occasion where Davies had been recorded as saying that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. He had already admitted to doing so once, but CBS and Logan had firmly backed him, saying that he had lied to his employer to protect himself.

Lying to the FBI, however, is a different matter, and “60 Minutes” pulled the report and said it was “reviewing” the new information to determine whether it had been misled.

That review led to Logan’s apology on Friday morning.

“The most important thing to every person at ’60 Minutes’ is the truth, and today the truth is that we made a mistake,” she said, calling it a very “disappointing” situation.

Logan said that the emergence of the FBI was “the moment for us when we realized that we no longer had confidence in our source.” She said that the show had taken the vetting of Davies “very seriously,” but that he had “misled” everyone.