CBS Timed Phony Benghazi Report to Boost Sales for Right-Wing Book

Discredited Benghazi Book Author Dylan Davies

I was busy this week grading midterm exams and struggling to contain my eleven year old's addiction to a crazy video game called "Minecraft."  So, I had not yet figured out how a slew of seemingly disconnected news items might fit together. They included CBS, 60 Minutes, Lara Logan, Benghazi, Simon & Schuster Publishers, and Morgan Jones, aka Dylan Davies.  But I am paying attention now and it is making me feel queasy.

Lara Logan of 60 Minutes claimed that she had spent a year putting together a Benghazi expose, based on eye witness reports of a security official named Morgan Jones, aka Dylan Davies.  FOX News and conservative commentators were in ecstasy when the 60 Minutes report purported to prove that they had been right all along.  An incompetent Obama Administration was responsible for the murder of our Libyan ambassador and others.  Only Mr. Morgan Jones/Dylan Davies had made up the story, which he had also sold to Simon & Schuster Publishers.  And they had released the book to coincide with the 60 Minutes story.  

Benghazi-gate is just another lunatic-fringe banner paraded around by Birthers, who claim to have the original copy of President Obama's Kenyan passport.  Okay, that much I get.

But for CBS to drag a once venerable 60-Minutes into becoming little more than an infomercial for selling right-wing books published by a CBS affiliate, we had all better take stock before its too late. I'm all the more grateful for Media Matters and investigative reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post for exposing the ruse.   But I'm beginning to believe that the kind of rot flung around by FOX News and packaged as news has begun to infest the legitimate media with  maggots.   

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