News Journal: Why do we let the media ignore their mistakes?

Sensational accusations about conspiracies and official misconduct have always sold newspapers. Especially in today’s 24/7 cable and Internet environment, the wildest charges often get the biggest headlines.
What if months later they are proved untrue? More headlines? Not likely.
Let’s talk about a classic case. Benghazi. Benghazi! BENGHAZI!
Of course you remember Benghazi. It was “Obama’s Watergate – but worse.” A “treasonous cover up.” The “scandal that would bring the administration down.” The drumbeat was constant for months, and the media had a field day. Not just the conservative media, either. That’s no doubt why polls back in May were showing that 42 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Benghazi had been handled, while only 27 percent said they approved.
That was then, this is now. Late on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving, the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Republican Rep. Mike Rogers issued its final report on Benghazi. Anyone in the news business knows that a Friday afternoon release is a sure sign that the committee is doing what it can to avoid attention. People are watching football on Saturdays, not reading newspapers or tuning in to cable news stations.
So it is possible you missed the stories about the report, few of which appeared on front pages. In fact, the cable channel that became known for featuring Benghazi virtually full time last spring hardly mentioned the report at all.
The Associated Press story buried on the inside pages of many newspapers on Saturday, Nov. 22, led with these paragraphs:
“A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.
“Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.
“In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why [it] was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.”
USA Today’s story concluded that “despite all the sound and fury, there simply was no ‘there’ there…Like six investigations before it, the House Committee found that the allegations of the Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate crowd were pretty much the stuff of fantasy.”
Will this admirably bipartisan report (and I do admire the integrity of the Republican majority) finally put an end to the Benghazi conspiracy theories? Of course not. One final House committee is in the process of spending a few million more dollars to go over the same ground that the previous six reports have covered. And if you have been screaming “Benghazi” for as long as Sen. Lindsey Graham has, you don’t surprise anyone by saying this latest report is “full of crap.”
What bothers me is that the media, with some notable exceptions, aren’t blaring the news about a report that repudiates the headlines they favored back a few months ago. As usual, ultimate vindication won’t undo all the harm done by sensational charges. Perhaps the latest report will move the polls by a few points, but without widespread media coverage I suspect most Americans will continue to think of Benghazi as a scandal, even if they can’t define what the scandal actually is.
I called how the media has handled Benghazi a classic case because I can think of a number of other important stories that were incorrectly reported without any subsequent meaningful effort to correct mistakes. We are right to demand accountability of our politicians, and we should do the same with the news sources we rely on to become informed citizens.
You might be interested in reading the full reports of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, especially to note how truly bipartisan they are. The House Report can be found at http://intelligence.house.gov/investigative-report-terrorist-attacks-us-facilities-benghazi-libya-september-11-12-2012 .
The Senate report can be found at http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/senate-intelligence-committee-report-on-benghazi-attack/748/ .
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.

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