Well, finally. Chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes
Jeff Fager, in a lengthy memo and outline of their findings from an
internal investigation, has asked Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan
to take a leave of absence from the program.
By now most of you have received the report from Al Ortiz about the problems with the 60 Minutes story on Benghazi.
There is a lot to learn from this mistake for the entire
organization. We have rebuilt CBS News in a way that has dramatically
improved our reporting abilities. Ironically 60 Minutes, which has been a
model for those changes, fell short by broadcasting a now discredited
account of an important story, and did not take full advantage of the
reporting abilities of CBS News that might have prevented it from
happening.
As a result, I have asked Lara Logan, who has distinguished herself
and has put herself in harm’s way many times in the course of covering
stories for us, to take a leave of absence, which she has agreed to do. I
have asked the same of producer Max McClellan, who also has a
distinguished career at CBS News.
Al Ortiz, Executive Director of Standards and Practices, lists 10 paragraphs outlining the series of events that led 60 Minutes
to invite Dylan Davies on the program under the false pretense that he
was an eyewitness to the Benghazi attack. His story quickly unraveled
and left CBS red-faced over the shoddy journalism involved.
Logan should have been fired, but this is a start.
Huffington Post's Michael Calderone has the full memo and findings here.
The political press has apparently learned nothing.
It
all seemed so positive. Bloggers relying on actual political science
(rather than just hunches and manufactured garbage) appeared to be
making serious inroads. The Monkey Cage (and my own blogging) are at the
Washington Post; political scientists have columns at lots of top
sites. A book on the 2012 election by political scientists John Sides
and Lynn Vavrick, which argued, in large part, that most of the gaffes
and the day-to-day ups and downs of the campaign didn’t really amount to
much, was getting terrific reviews.
It’s not just political
scientists. Nate Silver and a whole bunch of analysts good with numbers
have made reality-based political coverage, I thought, so much better.
Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog is excellent. Plenty of top reporters and analysts
(Salon’s Steve Kornacki and Brian Beutler very much included) are political science friendly.
And then? This week. In which we were treated to an all-out, no-holds-barred press frenzy. Kevin Drum surveyed what was going on:
Politico,
by my count, has no fewer than 14 front page headlines today about the
great Obamacare debacle. The Washington Post’s four top news articles
and its four top op-eds are all about Obamacare, and the top op-eds are
uniformly panicky…Ruth Marcus thinks Obama’s entire presidency at risk.
Ditto for Milbank. And if that’s not bad enough for you, Krauthammer
suggests that yesterday’s events spell doom for the entire liberal
project.
Not just conservatives, either; Ronald Brownstein devoted a column to, well, how the entire liberal project was at risk.
It
was a frenzy over … exactly what, anyway? The only shred of news about
the Affordable Care Act this week to hang all of the hype on was the
numbers on October signups, but given the thoroughly covered disaster
with the initial rollout, the results were surely no surprise at all. As
for the other strand of trouble, the pledge about keeping insurance,
that’s been around for a few weeks now and nothing really happened this
week to create a bigger flap.
All of which suggests that this is a press story, not a presidency or policy story.
The
press is comparing this healthcare disaster (presumably the one that
happened six weeks ago?) to Bush’s Katrina. A better comparison might be
from the Bill Clinton era: Whitewater.
Now, granted, it’s not
true that there’s no underlying story here. The healthcare.gov rollout
was a fiasco, and while it’s getting quite a bit better, it’s not a done
deal yet. The president’s rhetoric about keeping plans that people
liked was worth knocking down, although it was as worth knocking down in
2009 or 2010 or 2011 as it was this week. The continuing horror stories
about rate shock and canceled plans? Well, not all of them have been
debunked, and some of them will no doubt turn out to be real, even after
the exchanges are fully up and running. The press should absolutely be
tracking all of this. It’s a big, important story.
The problem is
that the big, important story is almost completely unrelated to the
press frenzy. As far as I can tell, most of the media riot was set off
by a single poll, a Quinnipiac poll, which wasn’t exactly an outlier,
but did come in lower than other polls out there (a 39 percent approval
rating for Barack Obama, compared with a bit over 42 percent in HuffPollster’s current estimate).
That went along with a press narrative that had focused on (very real)
Republican problems from the shutdown, without noticing that Obama’s
approval also fell during the same time. It all produced a sudden,
sharp, shift: “Obama survived the rollout fiasco thanks to the
shutdown!” suddenly, overnight, became “Obama’s approval in free fall!”
even though there really was no actual plunge.
So
why like Whitewater? The last media frenzy about Obama’s collapse (not
counting a smaller one over Syria) came in the spring, when Triple
Scandals threatened to destroy him. But those scandals fizzled
prematurely, leaving the scandal-loving press with a bad case of
frustration. Indeed, as Brandon Nyhan was writing before those Triple Scandals,
Obama was way overdue for something like that. When it didn’t pan out,
the press was presumably still primed for a pile-on, and even though ACA
implementation may not have been a promising topic, they worked with
what they had.
In other words, it’s like Whitewater because it’s
the result of the press primed and ready and waiting for something to
blow up around. It’s different because there is a real story here, but
that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how the press is behaving.
Like
Whitewater, or like the Triple Scandals from April, the phony frenzy
part of this will blow over soon. But not before there’s plenty of
damage – to the reputation of much of the working press, that is.
There’s this week’s real fiasco.
CBS News, already in trouble for not bothering to fact-check sensational claims about the Benghazi attacks, has stepped in it again with an exclusive story on the Affordable Care Act that has quickly fallen apart. On November 11, CBS News reported
that the "project manager in charge of building the federal health care
website was apparently kept in the dark about serious failures in the
website's security." CBS investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's report
was based on an exclusive "first look at a partial transcript" of
closed-door testimony by project manager Henry Chao that was likely
leaked to the network by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.
Other media outlets picked up CBS's scoop and ran with it.
According to Attkisson, Chao was presented with "a memo that outlined
important security risks discovered in the insurance system," and said
he was unaware of that memo. CBS News reported that this indicated that
Chao had been "kept in the dark about serious failures in the website's
security" that "could lead to identity theft among people buying
insurance."
But as Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple
demonstrated, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) questioned Chao at a November
13 Oversight Committee hearing and revealed how misleading CBS News'
report was. The memo shown to Chao dealt with portions of the website
that aren't yet in use -- not the website as it currently exists, as the
partial transcript and CBS News' report wrongly suggested. And those
portions won't include personally identifiable information, making it
impossible for the security risks to lead to identity theft.
Here's the video and transcript of Connolly's questioning of Chao:
CONNOLLY: Mr. Chao, during your interview with committee staff on
November 1, you were presented with a document you had not seen before.
And it was entitled "Authority to Operate," signed by your boss on
September 3, 2013, is that correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: The Republican staffers told you during that interview that
this document indicated there were two open high-risk findings in the
federally facilitated marketplace launched October 1. Is that correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: This surprised you at the time.
CHAO: Can I just qualify that a bit? It was dated September 3 and it
was referring to two parts of the system that were already--
CONNOLLY: You are jumping ahead of me. We are going to get there. So
when you were asked questions about that document, you told the staffers
you needed to check with officials at CMS [Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services] who oversee security testing to understand the
context, is that correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: The
staffers continued to ask you questions, nonetheless, and then they --
or somebody -- leaked parts of your transcript to CBS Evening News, is that correct?
CHAO: Seems that way.
CONNOLLY: Since that interview, have you had a chance to follow up on
your suggestion to check with CMS officials on the context?
CHAO: I have had some discussions about the nature of the high findings that were in the document.
CONNOLLY: Right. And this document it turns out discusses only the
risks associated with two modules, one for dental plans and one for the
qualified health plans, is that correct?
CHAO: Yes.
CONNOLLY: And neither of those modules is active right now, is that correct?
CHAO: That's correct.
CONNOLLY: So the September 3 document did in fact, not apply to the
entire federally facilitated marketplace despite the assertions of the
leak to CBS notwithstanding, is that correct?
CHAO: That's correct.
CONNOLLY: And these modules allow insurance companies to submit their
dental and health care plan information to the marketplace is that
correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: That means that
those modules do not contain or transmit any personally identifiable
information on individual consumers, is that correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: So to be clear, these modules don't transmit any specific user information, is that correct?
CHAO: Correct.
CONNOLLY: So when CBS Evening News
ran its report based on a leak, presumably from the majority staff, but
we don't know, of a partial transcript, excerpts from a partial
transcript, they said the security issues raised in the document, and I
quote, "could lead to identity theft among buying insurance," that
cannot be true based on what we just established in our back and forth,
is that correct?
CHAO: That's correct. I think there was some
rearrangement of the words that I used during the testimony in how it
was portrayed.
CONNOLLY: So to just summarize, correct me if I'm wrong, the document leaked to CBS Evening News didn't
in fact not relate to parts of the website that were active on October
1. They did not relate to any part of the system that handles personal
consumer information, and there, in fact, was no possibility of identity
theft, despite the leak.
There may never be a more classic line in the pantheon of empty
boasts by competitive news organizations. On Monday night, CBS News
reporter Sharyl Attkisson came up with what looked like a significant
story: “Memo warned of “limitless” security risks for HealthCare.gov.”
As the story and on-air broadcast alleged, the person entrusted with
putting together HealthCare.gov was “apparently kept in the dark about
serious failures in the website’s security. Those failures could lead to
identity theft among [those] buying insurance.”
How did Attkisson know this? “CBS News has obtained the first look at a partial transcript of his testimony.”
Which is like saying you’ve got the exclusive on half the story.
To consume Attkisson’s story is to freak out about HealthCare.gov.
The scoop here is that Henry Chao, Healthcare.gov’s chief project
manager at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), somehow
didn’t know about a Sept. 3 memo warning of issues on that troubled
government Web site. The transcript to which Attkisson gained access
spells out some serious alleged difficulties with the site. From the
televised report: “In excerpts we’ve obtained, Chao was asked about a
memo that outlined important security risks discovered in the insurance
system. Chao said he was unaware of this Sept. 3 government memo written
by another senior official at CMS. It found two high-risk issues which
are redacted for security reasons. The memo said, ‘The threat and risk
potential to the system is limitless.’ The memo shows CMS gave deadlines
of mid-2014 and early 2015 to address them.”
Via Attkisson’s treatment, Chao comes off looking clueless about a
critical aspect of HealthCare.gov. In her narrative, a Republican lawyer
questioning Chao asked him if he found it “surprising” that he’d never
seen that memo before. Chao replied, “‘Yeah . . . I mean, wouldn’t you
be surprised if you were me?’ He later added: ‘It is disturbing. I mean,
I don’t deny that this is . . . a fairly nonstandard way’ to proceed.”
In a hearing of the House oversight and government reform committee
today, Attkisson’s story received something of a public fact-check.
Rep. Gerald Connolly, apparently rankled by the CBS News piece, launched
a series of pointed questions at Chao. The short take from the exchange
is this: The CBS News report looks completely misleading. Here’s a
selective summary of what Connolly discussed with Chao:
Connolly: Correct that Republicans presented you with a document you hadn’t seen before? Chao: Correct.
Connolly: Correct that the document indicated that there were two
“open high-risk” findings in Obamacare exchange? Chao: Correct.
Connolly: Correct that someone leaked parts of your transcript to CBS News? Chao: “It seems that way.”
Connolly: Correct that the document discusses risks relating to two
Web site modules on dental plans and qualified health plans? Chao:
Correct.
Connolly: Correct that neither of those modules is active at this point? Chao: Correct.
Connolly: Correct that the Sept. 3 memo did not apply to the Obamacare marketplace? Chao: Correct.
Connolly: Correct that modules do not contain any personally identifiable information on consumers? Chao: Correct.
“So when CBS Evening News ran its report based on a leak, presumably
from the [Republican] staff, but we don’t know — of a partial transcript
— excerpts from a partial transcript — they said the security issues
raised in the document, and I quote, ‘could lead to identity theft among
buying insurance,’ that cannot be true based on what we established in
our back and forth. Is that correct?”
Chao replied: “That’s correct. I think there was some rearrangement
of the words I used during the testimony and how it was portrayed.”
The Erik Wemple Blog raised similar questions to CBS News yesterday. It declined to comment.
Attkisson’s story did contain this nod to the administration’s
position: “Health and Human Services told CBS News the privacy and
security of consumers’ personal information are a top priority, and
consumers can trust their information is protected by stringent security
standards.”
Journalism veterans and media observers continue to strike the same chord while launching a chorus
of criticism at CBS News in recent days: The network needs to be
transparent and explain exactly what happened with its botched Benghazi
report, and start detailing how such an obviously flawed report made in
onto the most-watched news program in America.
And yet it's silence from CBS, which is now stonewalling press
inquiries, as well as the calls for an outside review of its Benghazi
reporting. CBS' refusal to undergo a public examination in the wake of
such a landmark blunder stands in stark contrast to how news
organizations have previously dealt with black eyes; news organizations that once included CBS News.
CBS is now taking a radically different approach. There appears to
have been a corporate decision made that granting members of an
independent review panel unfettered access to 60 Minutes represents a greater danger than the deep damage currently being done to the network's brand via the two-week-old scandal.
So again and again the question bounces back to this: What is CBS hiding? And who is CBS protecting?
I'm sure network executives there are embarrassed by the controversy
and wish the report hadn't aired as it did. There's a reason Jeff Fager,
Chairman of CBS News (above left), ranked it as among the worst mistakes in the nearly 50 year history of 60 Minutes.
But as we learn more and more about the errors and oversights, it's
becoming increasingly difficult to understand the magnitude of the
malfeasance; the refusal by CBS to follow even rudimentary rules of
journalism.
In a small but telling example, Mother Jones recently reviewed
the Benghazi book that CBS' discredited "witness," Dylan Davies,
co-wrote, and which CBS supposedly relied on to corroborate this tale,
which included him informing the FBI about his heroic actions the night
of the attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi. (It was later confirmed
Davies wasn't even at the compound and the book was quickly recalled.) Mother Jones found Davies' published account to be completely, and almost comically, unbelievable:
Davies' improbable account of FBI agents weeping and spouting grateful platitudes only underscores how negligent 60 Minutes
was in vetting its story. Even if the FBI wouldn't confirm Davies'
account, why didn't they corroborate his tale with others who'd been
there?
But is being embarrassed really justification for not trying to find
out why the mistakes were made and to inform viewers what happened? And
if CBS refuses to learn from these sloppy mistakes, isn't the network
guaranteed to repeat them?
As it stonewalls, CBS cannot avoid the fact that in 2004 when 60 Minutes II
was caught in a crossfire of conservative outrage after airing a
disputed report about President Bush's Vietnam War record, the network
appointed a former Republican attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, to
investigate what went wrong. The review panel was given
"full access and complete cooperation from CBS News and CBS, as well as
all of the resources necessary to complete the task." Those resources
included reporters' notes, e-mails, and draft scripts. The panel worked
for three months, interviewed 66 people, and issued an-often scathing 234-page report.
Today, that standard established by CBS is being purposefully
bypassed. But why? Is it a fear of even further embarrassment? If you're
asking what could be more embarrassing than the current set of facts in
which CBS was duped by an "eyewitness" impostor, the answer is, plenty.
Imagine the possibly explosive findings to these questions: *Did CBS executives have internal discussions about the network's clear conflict of interest
with regards to Davies' book being published by CBS-owned Simon &
Schuster and decided not to reference that conflict in the final
Benghazi report? *Did the impending book release impact the reporting in the segment or the timing of the broadcast? *Did 60 Minutes producers have extensive contacts with partisan Republican sources while reporting on Benghazi? *Did any CBS executives express serious doubts about Davies' account only to be overruled by Logan? *Were script changes made to remove any doubts about Davies' account? *Did any co-workers think that Logan was pursuing a political agenda with the Benghazi report?
My guess is that a truly transparent review would find 'yes' answers
to two or three of those questions. But without an independent inquiry
we won't know. In that regard, refusing to appoint a review panel covers
up more bad news, which is what CBS seemingly wants. But a review could
also help exonerate CBS with regards to some allegations, and address
doubts about its professionalism.
Recall that one of the key conclusions from the National Guard panel review was that political bias did not
play a role in how the controversial 2004 story was put together. For
the Benghazi story though, it's impossible to know if CBS is equally
free of prejudice unless there's an independent assessment.
The other key question: By resisting an honest and open evaluation,
are CBS bosses trying to protect key players? Keep in mind that
following the release of the National Guard panel review, several
employees were fired, including the executive producer of 60 Minutes II.
Given the extent of the Benghazi screw-up, it's likely an outside
review today would find fault with the executive producer of today's 60 Minutes. Who is executive producer of 60 Minutes? It's Jeff Fager, who also runs CBS News. (The dual titles seem like an obvious conflict of interest.)
And since 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan says she was
deeply involved in the reporting and the editing of the Benghazi piece,
it's likely she would be the target of a stinging rebuke. So is CBS
refusing to appoint an independent panel in an effort to protect its
news boss Fager and its rising star Logan?
It certainly looks that way.
