Benghazi was a tragedy, not a scandal.

Virtually everything the Obama administration has said about the September 2012 attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, has been corroborated by the non-partisan Accountability Review Board led by George H.W. Bush’s U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen.

cbs newsEven Republican witch hunters on Capitol Hill gave up trying to connect Benghazi to their “Obama let Americans die” narrative when they found no facts to support it.

But CBS News’ esteemed "60 Minutes" gave them new hope when it recently aired a segment profiling a "Benghazi eye witness" named Dylan Davies, a mercenary in the employ of a British security firm. As it happens, Davies' breathless revelations about what he claimed he saw the night of the attacks coincided with the release of his book, "The Embassy House," published by Simon & Schuster.

Citing the 60 Minutes story, Sen. Lindsay Graham rushed to demand answers from the Obama administration saying until he received satisfaction he would hold up all Obama appointees. Meantime, Fox News hosts declared the 60 Minutes segment vindicated its own specious and slanted reporting on the Benghazi non-scandal.

Not long after the 60 Minutes story aired, an after-action report surfaced in which Davies told his employer he was nowhere near the American compound at the time of the attack. Correspondent Lara Logan was forced to publically apologize for her erroneous report, which chairman of CBS News Jeff Fager called it one of the worst mistakes in the program’s 50-year history.

CBS thought that was the end of it, but the network’s public relations problems are only beginning. You see, Simon & Schuster is owned by the CBS Corporation.

I know something about product placement in news programming. It appears that 60 Minutes, the country’s most respected and most watched news show, was promoting Davies’ book, hoping to boost its sales and the CBS bottom line.

I’m not the only one suggesting this. Media Matters for America Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert asks the following at his blog:

  • Did CBS executives have internal discussions about the network's clear conflict of interest with regard 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?  

“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,” writes Boehlert. “So again and again the question bounces back to this: What is CBS hiding? And who is CBS protecting?”

Good question.