Negative Effects From 60 Minutes' Failed Benghazi Story Continue

Even after CBS' Lara Logan apologized for and promised to correct a retracted 60 Minutes story on the Benghazi attacks featuring inconsistent accounts from an unreliable source, the ripple effects from the delay in retracting the report continue.

On the November 10 edition of State of the Union, CNN host Candy Crowley asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) if he would continue to block President Obama's nominees, after the false 60 Minutes report collapsed. Graham replied that he would continue blocking nominees, saying he's been requesting to talk to Benghazi survivors for a year. Crowley pushed further, explaining to Graham that “what spurred your action to block the president's nominees was the 60 Minutes report, so that's what prompted you to do this. I mean you did it the day after and you cited it.”

CBS' failure to properly vet its sources and its long delay in responding to criticism of its report has created ripple effects that continue to this day. Not only has CBS' credibility taken a huge hit, but the story has led Graham to block presidential nominations. Media Matters founder and chairman David Brock explained, when asked by MSNBC host Al Sharpton “how does [Graham] justify blocking every post that the president proposes,” that Republicans will continue investigating until they hear what they want to hear:

BROCK: What's going to happen here, rather than what should happen, is they're going to have some closed door hearings next week in front of a partisan committee. This source didn't work out for them, but they're going to keep looking and looking, until they get somebody who says what they want them to say.

Graham joins Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who cited the 60 Minutes report in his effort to appoint a special congressional committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks and continued to push for it after the report turned out to be false.

For more on conservative media myths about the September 2012 attack, read The Benghazi Hoax, the new e-book by Media Matters' David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt.