This is how 60 Minutes lamely dealt with its shocking hoax:
Here's a reminder of how Lara Logan saw the Benghazi story one month after the event in 2012, long before she was so "misled" by her source.
I wrote out my thoughts on Logan's bias in this piece yesterday and posted a full length version of her speech about journalism and the scary terrorists who are all coming to kill us in our beds. As I wrote there, I think it's fine that she's an unreconstructed war hawk who believes that the US should exact revenge for Benghazi, but she should be upfront about her worldview and 60 Minutes should be extra careful in vetting any "scoops" she comes up with that sound too good to be true.
Clearly, they feel they can get away with this without anyone having to pay a price. This, despite the fact that unlike the old Bush National Guard story that got Dan Rather fired, Benghazi is a contemporary story and it's having an effect on policy and politics in real time. But perhaps the difference really is that when Rather fell for a hoax, the entire Republican establishment went into high gear to ensure that his career was destroyed. The significance of the old and gossipy Guard story was negligible compared to this, but Logan is not widely considered to be a partisan (she isn't a Republican --- she's a hardcore military hawk, which isn't necessarily the same thing) and so the Democratic Party does not seem inclined to declare itself in this matter. Fox and the Republicans are successfully portraying this as some sort of Media Matters plot and dismissing it as a blip in the ongoing Benghazi! scandal which they see as one of their aces in the hole against Clinton. So, 60 Minutes obviously feels they can ride this out.
And sadly, they probably can. Logan is not only their up and coming super-star reporter, she's a sympathetic figure because of the horrifying sexual assault she suffered in Egypt. I do not see any career ramifications for her and probably not for her bosses, who she herself admits knew of her propensity to try to prove her pre-conceived narrative and yet did nothing to rein her in on this story.
For the rest of us it signals that 60 Minutes has become a conservative news program (and that's not based on this story alone.)It should be branded that way and seen in that light by the public at large. And that's fine. Considering that the president of CBS News spent his entire career at Fox News and Bloomberg prior to his current job, I'd say that becoming an openly conservative network was a conscious decision by CBS. (A process that started with Rather's firing.)
And sadly, speaking of Rather, even as Lara Logan is presumably allowed to continue her advocacy journalism without disclosing her advocacy, there's this:
Dan Rather says he’d hoped CBS News would ask him to be part of its coverage of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy‘s assassination. As Deadline reported two weeks ago, CBS News announced plans for coverages of the historic event without mentioning Rather, who was the CBS News guy assigned to the region, and who reported on the assassination in Dallas. Rather who is one of few journalists who covered the event who’s still around and working in the biz, will be included in CBS News coverage, but only in archival material in the news division’s 48 Hours special.
Because CBS doesn't want to be associated with his shoddy journalism.