CBS News has acknowledged that it was a mistake to trust a "60 Minutes" source who claimed to be at the scene of a 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and retracted that part of its report in a rare on-air statement Sunday.
"There are so many people out there who have the potential to deceive a news organization," said Jeffrey Fager, CBS News chairman and "60 Minutes" executive producer, in an interview with the Associated Press on Friday. "We do our best and I think we do very well at spotting them. This time, I really feel like one got through and it's extremely disappointing."
The correspondent responsible for the Oct. 27 story, Lara Logan, corrected the story on Sunday's show. She had interviewed former security contractor Dylan Davies, who claimed he took part in fighting at the mission. His story had been quickly doubted, and his credibility crumbled with a New York Times report late Thursday that revealed the FBI said the story Davies told them didn't match what he told CBS.
"That's when we realized that we no longer had confidence in our source, and that we were wrong to put him on the air, and we apologize to our viewers," Logan said on "CBS: This Morning" Friday.
