60 Minutes has a Problem

I love 60 Minutes. The show is a national treasure. It also happens to be extremely popular. It is routinely among the ten most-watched shows on television. That is an astounding fact considering that 60 Minutes is basically an investigative news show. Admittedly, it often includes light, entertainment stories as well, but its bread and butter is hard news.

Last week's story on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has caused quite an uproar. The focus of the controversy is that the show's primary source seems to have told a very different story to the FBI. 60 Minutes is now reviewing its reporting.

What I find frustrating about this is that the veracity of the witness, Greg Hicks, is not to my mind especially important. His story added some detail and color to the events, but did not change the basic narrative of what occurred. The really big problem with the report lies elsewhere, and it has gotten very little attention. The report ended with a lament, pained speculation about why military assets were not deployed to protect the U.S. forces on the ground.

LOGAN (VOICEOVER): [T]he lingering question is why no larger military response ever crossed the border into Libya -- something Greg Hicks realized wasn't going to happen just an hour into the attack.

LOGAN: You have this conversation with the defense attaché. You ask him what military assets are on their way. And he says--

HICKS: Effectively, they're not. And I -- for a moment, I just felt lost. I just couldn't believe the answer. And then I made the call to the annex chief, and I told him, "Listen, you've got to tell those guys there may not be any help coming."

LOGAN: That's a tough thing to understand. Why?

HICKS: It just is. We--for us, for the people that go out-- onto the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they're coming to get us. That our back is covered. To hear that it's not, it's a terrible, terrible experience.

When I watched the show Sunday I was appalled. The issue of the lack of military response to the events in Benghazi has been repeatedly and exhaustively addressed by top military officials. It simply is not possible that 60 Minutes was unaware of this. This means that the show intentionally left out crucial information from their report in order to--one can only assume--make the events seem more controversial than they were. This is pretty much the functional definition of sensationalst journalism, something I thought that 60 Minutes was above.

The liberal media website Media Matters has covered this fairly well, but the mainstream press has largely ignored this part of the story.

My guess is that 60 Minutes will end up retracting or substantially altering its story because of the apparent unreliability of its main witness. It may even issue an apology. My fear is that it will not acknowledge its failure to fully report on the issue of the military response, which is the bigger problem with the story.

This reminds me of the mini-scandal discussed here over Bob Woodward's book on John Belushi, in which a highly-respected journalist shaves the facts just enough to add to the story's dramatic impact. It isn't lying exactly, but rather putting selective emphasis--spin if you like--on a story to make it seem more dramatic or controversial than it actually is. Hollywood does this all of the time when making docudramas. Argo is an excellent example of this. The extremely tense and dramatic airport escape is basically a complete fabrication. In contrast, Zero Dark Thirty sticks much closer to the historical facts while telling its story. Its only really flaw is that it portrays as routine harsh interrogation practices that were controversial inside the government even at the time they were being used.

I expected more from 60 Minutes.