Whoops:
CBS News apologized this morning for airing the accusations of a now-apparently-fake Benghazi whistleblower, Dylan Davies.
Davies is the author of a new bombshell book accusing the Obama administration of massive security failures leading up to the fatal attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya in September of 2012.
Davies repeated his fanciful story on this past Sunday’s 60 Minutes television show, in which Davies claimed to have been at the Benghazi consulate during the attack, and heroically recounted how he climbed the compound’s 12 foot wall and clocked a terrorist with the butt of his rifle, and how he personally witnessed the charred remains of US Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack.
The problem is that at the time of the attack, Davies told his supervisor a completely different story, saying that he was unable to reach the compound and never saw Stevens's body. Amazingly, CBS stood by its reporting even after that information was revealed, even though they didn't know it before running their report—they accepted Davies's claim that he had lied to his supervisor because he hadn't been authorized to go to the compound, but was finally telling the truth now.
But when the New York Times revealed that Davies had also told the FBI that he didn't go near the compound on the night of the attack, CBS finally realized they had fallen for a hoax because Davies had claimed to them that he had told the FBI the same thing that he told 60 Minutes.
The whole thing was a clusterfuck by CBS from start to finish, but they can't say it was unavoidable. From the very beginning, Media Matters punched holes in the CBS report, but CBS ignored their warnings—and now they are paying the price for allowing themselves to get sucked into the right-wing universe in which Benghazi is one of the greatest political scandals in American history. The reality is that if there's anything scandalous about Benghazi, it's how conservatives and their media lapdogs have tried to exploit it for political gain and viewer ratings.
