by Joseph Klein
The George Soros-funded left-wing propaganda mill known as Media Matters continues its campaign to whitewash the Obama administration’s Benghazi failures and cover-up. Media Matters has seized on CBS’s retraction of its October 27, 2013 60 Minutes story on the Benghazi attacks to discredit anyone who dares question the Obama administration’s actions leading up to, during and following September 11, 2012, when four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, were killed.
CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who originally reported on the story, ended up apologizing on the air for her interview with Dylan Davies, an ex-security officer identifying himself by his pseudonym Morgan Jones. Davies evidently lied during the interview about his true whereabouts on the fateful night of the Benghazi attack. Logan and her producers failed to check out adequately the veracity of Davies’ account before it aired. Davies claimed that he had entered the Benghazi special mission compound where he had supposedly confronted one of the attackers. He also said he had seen the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens in a local hospital. It turns out that Davies gave a very different account to the FBI and in an incident report he filed with his employer, which CBS did not catch or take seriously enough before it highlighted Davies in its story.
Media Matters is now crowing over how Lara Logan and her employer CBS were forced to eat crow. The episode, Media Matters wants us to believe, proves its contention all along that any criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi matter amounts to nothing more than a “right-wing hoax.” For this reason, it had made the debunking of the 60 Minutes story, in its own words, “priority one, priority two, and priority three.”
Here’s the problem for Media Matters and its fellow left-wing revisionists. Other portions of the 60 Minutes story, as well as prior congressional testimony by unassailable sources, still provide overriding proof of the Obama administration’s malignant neglect of requests for better security beforehand that might have held back the attackers. The sacred promise relied on by the brave men and women serving their country in dangerous parts of the world – “No One Left Behind” – was violated. The commander-in-chief was apparently AWOL that night, leaving it up to his subordinates to decide whether and how to respond militarily to the attacks which lasted more than seven hours. The evidence establishes that there was a stand-down order and that the right military assets to rescue the Americans under siege were not made available in time. And Media Matters refuses to face the truth that the Obama administration deliberately covered up the fact that it was aware almost immediately of al Qaeda’s involvement in the attacks. Instead, President Obama, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and other administration officials continued to peddle their false talking points for weeks thereafter, blaming an obscure anti-Muslim video for the tragedy.
Senator John McCain put it best when he said in response to the liberals’ exploitation of the botched CBS story to chill any further criticism of the Obama administration’s botching of the Benghazi matter: “It appears to me as if they are trying to shoot the messenger here, rather than try to explain the total mishandling of this whole situation.”
None of this excuses CBS for botching its story with respect to Dylan Davies and not properly vetting his account before putting him on the air. CBS would do well to bring in an independent panel to investigate what went wrong and make recommendations for improvement, as it did in the case of Dan Rather’s flawed 60 Minutes report on President Bush’s National Guard service in 2004.
Lara Logan erred in her reporting, and in her vouching for her discredited source even after doubts began to be raised about him. But does Media Matters honcho David Brock really believe that he is in a position to judge the record of an award-winning journalist who has risked her life reporting from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and who suffered a brutal sexual assault while reporting from the streets of Cairo during the 2011 uprising against Egyptian President Mubarak? “I was dying in that square,” she said. “I never thought I’d see my children again.”
David Brock, by contrast, has no relevant war reporting experience that we know of. His career highlight is turning from being a self-described right-wing hit man commentator to a left-wing hit man and founder of the pro-Democratic Party Media Matters attack machine. Unlike Lara Logan, who has seen death up close in conflict zones and believes that the fallen must not be forgotten, Brock’s narcissism showed through when he said about his conversion from conservatism: “David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead.” He apparently sees himself as a resurrected liberal on the side of the virtuous against the evil conservatives.
Yes, Logan stumbled badly by being over-zealous in relying on the word of a lying source when her mission was to find out and report the truth to the American people. But she owned up to her mistake, saying on CBS This Morning: “You know the most important thing to every person at ’60 Minutes’ is the truth. And today the truth is we made a mistake. And that’s a..that’s very disappointing for any journalist. That’s very disappointing for me. Nobody likes to admit they made a mistake. But if you do, you have to stand up and take responsibility – and you have to say you were wrong. And in this case we were wrong.”
Brock, by contrast, remains the unthinking hit man with no concern for finding the truth, whatever the truth may turn out to be. He merely switched sides. For Brock to go on MSNBC’s Al Sharpton show and demand that CBS apologize to the Obama administration and the families of the Americans killed in Benghazi, for example, is way over the top. And for Al Sharpton to self-righteously condemn CBS for its mistaken reliance on Davies is a joke, considering his own involvement in perpetrating the Tawana Brawley rape allegations that a grand jury found to be fabricated.
Joseph Klein
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/media-matters-mission-to-bury-benghazi/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment