There’s fallout of Benghazi, but not the kind that Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham had in mind: in what is clearly the result of a corporate decision after an inquiry and some soul searching, CBS News’ Lara Logan is taking a leave of absence over the “60 Minutes” report touted by conservative critics of the Obama administration — a report that fizzled. Actually, given the way news organizations work, anyone who worked at a news organization (such as yours truly) doesn’t find this development surprising:

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 news magazine’s discredited Oct. 27 Benghazi report.

“As Executive Producer, I am responsible for what gets on the air,” Fager wrote in a memo obtained by The Huffington Post. “I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have.”

On the Oct. 27 broadcast, Logan interviewed Dylan Davies, a security officer who claimed that he witnessed the terrorist attack on the Benghazi compound that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. Davies, who had trained Libyan security guards for the State Department, claimed he scaled a 12-foot wall that night, knocked out a terrorist with his rifle and later saw Stevens dead in the hospital.

But four days later, The Washington Post reported that Davies had told his employer shortly after the attack that he never reached the compound that night, an account that conflicted with the one he had given to “60 Minutes,” as well as included in a memoir. The memoir was published by a conservative imprint that is a subsidiary of CBS, a financial relationship that was not disclosed at the time of the broadcast.

And, in reality, there may have NOT been a corporate incestuous relationship involved here. But it’s always the appearance that news organizations seek to safeguard, since their credibility and not just branding hinges on it. MORE:

“60 Minutes” dodged questions for several days about the conflicting accounts. Fager later told HuffPost that Davies assured him that he was at the compound that night and the account revealed by The Washington Post wasn’t accurate. On Nov. 6, Fager was still standing by the report, telling HuffPost he was “proud” of it.

One day later, The New York Times reported that Davies had also told the FBI he never reached the compound, the second known instance of Davies telling a different story than the one he told on “60 Minutes” and in his book. “60 Minutes” quickly pulled the story and Logan apologized on air the following morning.

The Huffington Post piece offers more details about the case and the network’s response. Go to the link to read it all.

The New York Daily News:

An internal CBS investigation summarized by Al Ortiz, director of standards and practices, found that among other things, the Logan-McLellan team “did not sufficiently vet Davies’ account of his own actions and whereabouts that night.”
The internal report suggested Logan and McLellan could have used the greater resources of CBS News to have questioned Davies’s credibility.

It also suggested that even their own reporting, in which Davies said he had lied to his superiors about going to the compound that night, “should have been a red flag in the editorial vetting process.”

And this is potentially damning:

Almost as a footnote, Ortiz’s report said Logan may have violated CBS News standards by reporting the story at all

Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore writes:

Most of the reaction to this development has focused on the question of what CBS has learned from this deeply embarrassing incident. But I wonder about Lara Logan. Will she take her medicine and climb back up the slippery pole of on-camera talent she seemed to be ascending quite rapidly before she decided to begin a new Benghazi! furor? Or will she make a strategic retreat into celebrity reporting or science reporting or sports reporting?

The short-cut for her, of course, will be to assume the mantle of Conservative Media Martyr and land a gig with Fox, where there will be no “internal investigations” of reporters who bend the rules in pursuit of Big Stories like Benghazi!. If she resists that temptation, then perhaps there is hope for her as a legitimate journalist who admits when she’s wrong and rededicates herself to journalism.

But she is already paying a price:

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan is no longer hosting the Committee to Protect Journalists’ press freedom awards dinner Tuesday night in New York.

In her place will be “CBS Evening News” anchor and fellow “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley.

The decision to have Logan host came as a surprise to many, who noted that Logan is currently in the middle of a controversy surrounding her now-retracted “60 Minutes” report on the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

We’ve reached out to CPJ for comment and will update when we hear back.

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JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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