Sheryl Attkisson: CBS Honchos Ordered Me to Present a False Account of Obama's Words on Whether Benghazi Was a Terrorist Attack

As you remember, Obama denied repeatedly that Benghazi had been a terrorist attack, but eventually facts leaked out making this position untenable.

He then asserted in his Denver debate with Mitt Romney that he had called it a terrorist attack from the get-go.

Not so. And CBS had an interview with Obama conducted the day after the attack showing Obama refusing to call it a terrorist attack.

But they ordered Attkisson, she says, to go with a quote that made it sound as if he had told Steve Kroft it had in fact been a terrorist attack.

Turns out that Steve Kroft had conducted a “60 Minutes” interview with Obama the day after the attack, portions of which had never aired. When Attkisson did a story on the flap, her CBS bosses instructed her to use a particular script and a particular sound bite that seemed to back up the president’s version.

She was stunned when a CBS colleague later read her another exchange from the interview:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.

OBAMA: Right.

The correspondent then asked point-blank:

KROFT: Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?

OBAMA: Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.

Attkisson writes, "I couldn’t get past the fact that upper-level journalists at CBS had been a party to misleading the public."

Under pressure from Attkisson and others, the network posted the exchange on its website the Sunday night before the election, but it got lost in the final hours of the campaign. She says CBS News President David Rhodes promised her there would be an internal investigation, but she never heard another word about it.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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