Report: Lara Logan’s Return To CBS Up In The Air

For months, it’s been an open question whether and when “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan would return from her leave of absence at CBS News.

A lengthy New York magazine report published Sunday suggests that Logan’s return is far from certain. In the piece contributing editor Joe Hagan explores the tensions that simmered within CBS News, where his sources in the network described the current atmosphere as “toxic,” since Logan was forced to apologize last November for a flawed report on the Benghazi attacks.

The report that led to Logan’s suspension centered around a British security contractor, Dylan Davies, who gave a heroic first-person account of the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi. The contractor’s credibility was called into question after the segment aired, when it was reported that Davies may not have been present on the night of the attacks at the compound.

As Hagan puts it, a “perfect storm” of recklessness on Logan’s part, her bosses’ reluctance to keep their star correspondent in check and a lack of oversight in CBS’ news division allowed the problematic Benghazi report to hit the airwaves.

“It’s not an accident that Lara Logan fucked up,” one of Logan’s colleagues told the magazine. “It was inevitable. Everybody saw this coming.”

During the fallout from the report, a founding member of “60 Minutes,” Morley Safer, reportedly marched into executive producer Jeff Fager’s office and demanded that Logan be fired, but to no avail. Another unnamed source suggested to the magazine that CBS President Les Moonves has since “soured” on Logan, whom he previously treated as a favorite.

So whether Logan will return this fall is still very much up in the air — and there’s already another correspondent waiting on deck, Clarissa Ward, that Fager is “very high on,” according to an unnamed producer.

Read the whole piece here.