{"id":2430097,"date":"2025-05-02T07:41:01","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T11:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/60-minutes-and-the-biggest-media-scandal-youve-never-heard-of\/"},"modified":"2025-05-02T07:43:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T11:43:41","slug":"60-minutes-and-the-biggest-media-scandal-youve-never-heard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/60-minutes-and-the-biggest-media-scandal-youve-never-heard-of\/","title":{"rendered":"60 Minutes And The Biggest Media Scandal You&#8217;ve Never Heard Of"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2F60-minutes-and-the-biggest-media-scandal-youve-never-heard-of%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2430097&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Last week,Bill Owens,teh executive producer of CBS&#8217;s renowned news program *60 Minutes*,resigned,citing concerns over interference with his journalistic independence,particularly from the network&#8217;s parent company,Paramount. Following his resignation, *60 Minutes* aired a supportive tribute to him, despite the absence of direct evidence for the alleged unethical corporate behavior influencing his departure. Speculation suggests that Paramount&#8217;s controlling shareholder, Shari redstone, may have sought to align the network&#8217;s reporting with political interests tied to securing a lucrative sale and settling legal matters with donald Trump.<\/p>\n<p>Critics point out that Owens&#8217;s tenure has been marked by significant journalistic failings, leading *60 Minutes* to appear increasingly biased. Notable scandals during his time include a flawed report on the Benghazi attack, which reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton while failing to uphold journalistic integrity. Moreover, owens reportedly maintained connections with individuals involved in politically maneuvering coverage to protect Clinton\u2019s image.<\/p>\n<p>The article critiques the financial motivations behind alleged corporate influence on *60 minutes* while questioning Owens&#8217;s commitment to factual reporting and journalistic principles throughout his career.Despite the network&#8217;s tribute to him, the author expresses skepticism over Owens&#8217;s impact on maintaining the integrity of the program amidst continued reputational damage.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Last week, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS&rsquo; flagship news program <em>60 Minutes<\/em>, resigned, &ldquo;citing encroachments on his journalistic independence,&rdquo; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/22\/business\/media\/cbs-60-minutes-trump-bill-owens.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">per The New York Times<\/a>. In the first show since the news of Owens&rsquo; resignation broke, <em>60 Minutes<\/em> ended the program with a <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/BlueATLGeorgia\/status\/1916654600544755721\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">glowing, if dubious, tribute to Owens<\/a> that has since gone viral online. The program took the unusual step of alleging unethical behavior by CBS&rsquo; corporate parent Paramount for Owens&rsquo; resignation, though they didn&rsquo;t present any direct evidence of this. And the facts suggest that portraying Owens isn&rsquo;t exactly the paragon of integrity he&rsquo;s being made out to be.<\/p>\n<p>The proximate cause for said encroachments is widely assumed to be politics. According to the Times, &ldquo;Paramount&rsquo;s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/30\/business\/media\/paramount-trump-cbs-news-settlement.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eager to secure<\/a>&nbsp;the Trump administration&rsquo;s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Supposedly, Redstone has also expressed a desire to settle Donald Trump&rsquo;s case against <em>60 Minutes<\/em> over allegations they deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris last fall. And though the Times is loathe to discuss it, there&rsquo;s also lots of speculation that Redstone, an observant Jew, was less than thrilled when <em>60 Minutes<\/em> recently ran an offensively stupid segment where veteran reporter Leslie Stahl <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2025\/04\/03\/us-news\/60-minutes-host-ripped-for-asking-ex-hostage-if-hamas-starved-him-due-to-lack-of-food\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">asked a freed Israeli hostage if his Hamas captors starved him unintentionally<\/a> because Hamas ran out of food. It&rsquo;s well established that Hamas steals and hoards all the food and aid coming into Gaza, and it beggars belief that anyone, let alone someone who gets paid millions by a news network, would think a terrorist organization deserves the benefit of the doubt. And further, that layers of producers and editors would put this on the air.<\/p>\n<p>There may be some truth to any or all of these accusations about what&rsquo;s motivating Paramount and Redstone, but if Paramount is attempting to politicize <em>60 Minutes<\/em>&lsquo; reporting, at least they&rsquo;re trying to make a buck out of it. Bill Owens spent 26 years at <em>60 Minutes,<\/em> eventually presiding over a news operation that has willfully corrupted itself, to the point where its bias has turned the show into a laughingstock. And in at least one instance that I am familiar with, Owens played a pivotal role in a gross journalistic failing at <em>60 Minutes<\/em> that ultimately helped a Democratic presidential candidate evade responsibility for an international incident that got Americans killed.<\/p>\n<h2>Cloud of Scandal<\/h2>\n<p>Since Owens joined <em>60 Minutes<\/em>, it&rsquo;s hard to know where to begin cataloging the embarrassments. Its recent defense of Hamas and its refusal to follow past precedent and release an unedited transcript of the show&rsquo;s interview with Kamala Harris, who is unable to answer basic questions in ways that aren&rsquo;t insultingly inane, for fear of damaging her electoral chances were just par for the course.<\/p>\n<p>The most notorious incident occurred in 2004, when <em>60 Minutes<\/em> started a news revolution, albeit inadvertently, after internet amateurs demonstrated they were often more capable than the most respected corporate news entities. Dan Rather, maybe the biggest name in TV news at the time, breathlessly reported that <em>60 Minutes<\/em> had obtained documents showing that political pressure was applied to excuse President George W. Bush&rsquo;s poor performance in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush&rsquo;s time in the Texas Air National Guard was already seen as a convenient way of avoiding the Vietnam draft. The report aired just months before Bush&rsquo;s reelection, where he was running against Sen. John Kerry, who had milked his four months in Vietnam for all it was worth. Critics, however, had rightly noted that Kerry&rsquo;s account of his service was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/news\/1138415\/setting-the-record-straight-on-the-swift-boat-veterans\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">full of lies and distortions<\/a>, and this had been a major campaign story. Anything that could further undermine Bush&rsquo;s National Guard service would be enormously helpful to the Kerry campaign and make his own Vietnam service look more honorable by contrast.<\/p>\n<p>And so Rather and <em>60 Minutes<\/em> rushed to air with a dubious almost-October surprise, clearly designed to kneecap the Bush campaign. Seemingly within minutes of the report airing, bloggers &mdash; social media was not yet A Thing &mdash; were pointing out that the documents Rather claimed that <em>60 Minutes<\/em> had authenticated were clearly produced on a modern word processor, and not a typewriter as would have been the case when the documents were allegedly produced in the early seventies. Compared to the defensive nature of news organizations today, refreshingly, CBS ran a major investigation into what happened, concluded it could not stand by the story, and ended Rather&rsquo;s broadcast career.<\/p>\n<p>Now Owens didn&rsquo;t join <em>60 Minutes<\/em> management until 2007, and wasn&rsquo;t made top producer of the show until 2019, and, as far as I know, had nothing to do with the infamous Rathergate scandal. But it&rsquo;s clear that when Owens started to run things at <em>60 Minutes<\/em>, the show was still coming out of a cloud of scandal. If Owens was cognizant of this, let alone cared about the integrity of the program, there&rsquo;s not much outward evidence he made sure the program was committed to fairness.<\/p>\n<p>When he popped up in the news recently being lauded for his supposed integrity, it took me a while to remember where I&rsquo;d heard his name. And then I recalled that Owens was smack in the center of an absolutely wild story about Hillary Clinton &mdash; and that&rsquo;s saying something &mdash; that might be one of the biggest media scandals you&rsquo;ve never heard of. <\/p>\n<h2>&lsquo;Benghazi and the Bombshell&rsquo;<\/h2>\n<p>In September of 2015, President Donald Trump was still an unthinkable idea, but everyone knew Hillary Clinton was running. One of her biggest liabilities was the Benghazi scandal, where Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaeda affiliated terror group, attacked the U.S. embassy in the Libyan city, resulting in the deaths of four Americans and the ambassador&rsquo;s body being dragged through the streets on September 11, 2012. Then Secretary of State Clinton clearly dodged responsibility for the incident; to start, she had been major advocate for the 2011 NATO bombing campaign of the country, which resulted in the death of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which destabilized the country and allowed for the rise of Ansar al-Sharia and other militia groups. (The 2011 bombing of Libya has a remarkable place in the annals of American foreign policy mistakes. The country remains a failed state with open slave markets, and it is an especially active and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecchr.eu\/en\/press-release\/civil-society-organisations-call-for-eu-libya-migration-funding-freeze-as-mass-graves-discovered\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">deadly conduit for illegal migration to Europe<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Rather than acknowledge the basic facts of what happened, Clinton claimed that the Benghazi attack, which was obviously an al Qaeda attack on the anniversary of September 11 no less, was actually motivated by Muslims angry about a blasphemous YouTube video. As alternate excuses go, this one was particularly offensive. It was also parroted by Barack Obama and Susan Rice, and this led to the arrest of the maker of the YouTube video for unrelated parole violations, raising First Amendment concerns since the parole violations clearly weren&rsquo;t the impetus for the federal manhunt that ensued. Finding someone else to blame for Clinton and Obama&rsquo;s blundering was a much more likely motivation, and even years later, Republicans in Congress were still investigating and trying to get to the bottom of what went on in Benghazi.<\/p>\n<p>And it wasn&rsquo;t just congressional Republicans that were investigating. It seems quaint now, but there was a time when if a scandal surrounding a Democrat seemed large enough, liberal corporate media organizations rolled up their sleeves and went to work. In March of 2015, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/private-emails-reveal-ex-clinton-aides-secret-spy-network\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">joint investigation between Pro-Publica and the now defunct Gawker<\/a> on Clinton&rsquo;s involvement in Benghazi dropped and contained some startling revelations. Hacked emails from Clinton released online in 2013 revealed that &ldquo;starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Blumenthal was a notorious political operative, renowned for his dirty tricks and fealty to the Clintons. (When Clinton ran against Obama in the Democrat primary in 2008, Blumenthal was actually the person responsible for starting the rumors Barack Obama wasn&rsquo;t born in the U.S. and thus ineligible to be president &mdash; &ldquo;birtherism&rdquo; spread to the right-wing later.) The CIA operative in question, Tyler Drumheller, also had a very checkered reputation. The former head of the CIA&rsquo;s clandestine operations in Europe, Drumheller left the agency in 2005 and quickly became minor hero to the left for publicly questioning the intel sources the Bush administration had used to justify the Iraq War. This resulted in Drumheller&rsquo;s accounts of what happened being picked apart and excoriated as dishonest and unreliable by former CIA director George Tenet, who served as CIA director under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/At-Center-Storm-Years-CIA\/dp\/0061234419?crid=35HAJI04RQ3X8&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=at+the+center+of+the+storm%2Cstripbooks%2C88&amp;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">several pages of his 2007 memoir<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The other shocking thing about what Blumenthal and Drumheller were doing was that they were also working with David L. Grange, a major general who formerly ran a secret special operations unit. Grange had since founded &ldquo;Osprey Global Solutions,&rdquo; a private military and logistics company &mdash; think Blackwater et al. &mdash; listed as a &ldquo;global partner&rdquo; on the State Department&rsquo;s website.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, this unholy triumvirate was in regular communication with Hillary Clinton about Global Osprey Solutions&rsquo; presumably lucrative contracts helping the transitional authority in Libya &ldquo;assist in the resumption of access to its assets and operations in country&rdquo; as well as training supporting forces in &ldquo;rule-of-land warfare.&rdquo; And per ProPublica, Tyler Drumheller LLC was also pitching its services &ldquo;to develop a program that will <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\">provide discreet confidential information allowing<\/a> the appropriate entities in Libya to address any regional and international challenges.&rdquo; They were also directly feeding intelligence reports to Clinton. The day after the Benghazi attack, Drumheller even sent Clinton a memo saying Ansar al-Sharia was behind the attack, not people angry about a YouTube video. If Clinton was trying to extract herself from responsibility for Benghazi, it probably didn&rsquo;t help that people with a direct line to her were obviously trying to exploit the situation.<\/p>\n<p>Now interestingly enough, the heat on Hillary Clinton for Benghazi was still such that even <em>60 Minutes<\/em> had turned their eye toward an expos&eacute;. This culminated in a disastrous report on Benghazi by Lara Logan in the fall of 2013. Logan&rsquo;s <em>60 Minutes<\/em> report had centered on the tale of a private military contractor named Dylan Davies, who claimed to have tried and failed to save the four people killed in Benghazi. He told an accusatory eyewitness tale of how the U.S. government could and should have done more to save the men killed in the attack. Almost as soon as it aired, there were questions about the truth of Davies&rsquo; account, which contradicted what he had told his employer, another mercenary outfit called Blue Mountain Group, as well as the State Department. The report completely fell apart and CBS went so far as to remove the transcript of Logan&rsquo;s report from news services.<\/p>\n<p>Logan was an unusually attractive South African reporter who&rsquo;d had a meteoric rise before landing a coveted spot on America&rsquo;s most prestigious news program, and there was no shortage of industry rivals looking to take her down a peg. And while the problems of Logan&rsquo;s high-profile report would be notable by any standard, it certainly didn&rsquo;t help that Logan&rsquo;s report had dared to threaten the presidential ambitions of a Democrat presidential candidate, who the media usually handle with kid gloves. A few months after the report aired, New York magazine ran a gossipy 6,500 word story about the <em>60 Minutes<\/em> scandal headlined, &ldquo;<a href=\"https:\/\/nymag.com\/news\/features\/lara-logan-cbs-news-2014-5\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Benghazi and the Bombshell: Is Lara Logan too toxic to return to &lsquo;60 Minutes?&rsquo;<\/a>&rdquo; Logan ended up taking a leave of absence from <em>60 Minutes<\/em> and eventually left CBS altogether.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, all the coverage of the CBS scandal was focused on Logan and didn&rsquo;t really ask many hard questions about what the hell happened to <em>60 Minutes<\/em>&lsquo; vaunted editorial process to allow Logan&rsquo;s flawed report to make it to air. At this point I&rsquo;d been following the ProPublica details closely. I had previously done a lot of reporting on the government&rsquo;s increasing reliance on private military companies during the Iraq War, and the maneuverings of Global Osprey Solutions caught my eye, to say nothing of the fact that anytime Sidney Blumenthal&rsquo;s name appears in the news it&rsquo;s a strong indication something is not right. I wrote a lengthy follow-up to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/news\/425598\/meet-the-men-behind-hillary-clintons-private-spy-network\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the Pro-Publica report<\/a> on Clinton&rsquo;s spy ring, and some months later someone passed on a very interesting tidbit: One of the people involved in working on Lara Logan&rsquo;s ill-fated <em>60 Minutes<\/em> report was none other than Tyler Drumheller.<\/p>\n<h2>Ignored Corruption<\/h2>\n<p>Drumheller&rsquo;s turn against the Bush administration garnered him a lot of favorable press, which included a glowing <em>60 Minutes<\/em> profile, titled &ldquo;A Spy Speaks Out.&rdquo; At some point, in the years that followed Drumheller developed a professional relationship with <em>60 Minutes<\/em>. I&rsquo;m told that it&rsquo;s not uncommon for major news agencies to keep people with access to the world of spooks around to consult on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/former-senator-harry-reid-thinks-government-has-ufo-fragments-backs-ex-pentagon-official-who-claims-cover-up\/\" title=\"Former Senator Harry Reid Thinks Government Has UFO \u2018Fragments\u2019 Backs Ex...Pentagon Offici... Who Claims Cover...Up\">sensitive national security matters<\/a>, and in 2015 when I was reporting on all this it seemed a little less suspect than it does now, especially considering we were a year away from a torrent of dishonest leaks from the intel community attempting to tie Donald Trump to Russia.<\/p>\n<p>But in the case of Tyler Drumheller, it was still plenty suspect. In an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/magazine\/2101951\/hillarys-spymaster\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">article for the now-defunct The Weekly Standard magazine<\/a>, I reported that Logan&rsquo;s story, which was reported on over a period of several months, was not originally focused on the problematic testimony of Dylan Davies: &ldquo;A source with personal knowledge of how the report came together told The Weekly Standard that when Logan started working on the report soon after the attack, in the fall of 2012, it was originally focused on establishing al Qaeda&rsquo;s role and the White House and State Department&rsquo;s attempts to obfuscate this central fact. According to the source, Drumheller was working behind the scenes to discourage Logan from making her report about the Obama administration&rsquo;s evading questions about al Qaeda&rsquo;s role in Benghazi.&rdquo; (For what it&rsquo;s worth, I also wrote <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/news\/1600041\/what-was-a-member-of-clintons-secret-spy-network-doing-while-working-for-cbs-news\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a longer, more detailed report<\/a> on this than what appeared in the magazine for the Weekly Standard website.)<\/p>\n<p>In other words, <em>60 Minutes<\/em>&lsquo; most high-profile journalistic failure since Rathergate came about not necessarily because Logan failed to do her job. It was more than likely a result of allowing a dubious and manipulative ex-CIA agent to shape their coverage of the Benghazi attack, even though he was concurrently currying favor with Hillary Clinton for personal profit. And if you&rsquo;d asked a celebrated practitioner of the political dark arts such as Sidney Blumenthal and a CIA clandestine operations expert to bump heads and find a way to discredit a <em>60 Minutes<\/em> report that could potentially do real damage to her nascent presidential campaign, it wouldn&rsquo;t be hard to imagine coming up with an operation just like this.<\/p>\n<p>CBS told me on record, &ldquo;Tyler Drumheller was not involved in any way on the Benghazi story,&rdquo; but did not deny he had worked for the news program. And this contradicted my own highly credible, albeit off the record, sources from CBS News and <em>60 Minutes<\/em> telling me otherwise. I thought for sure my report would make <em>some <\/em>waves, but aside from a few raised eyebrows online, as far as I know <em>60 Minutes<\/em> got no questions about what they were doing working with the likes of Tyler Drumheller from other media organizations. It didn&rsquo;t help that Drumheller died from a bout with cancer two months before my report was published in October of 2015 and was no longer available to answer questions.<\/p>\n<p>I went back to the Blumenthal-Drumheller well years later, after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearinvestigations.com\/articles\/2019\/09\/09\/clinton-libya_and_trump-russia_a_tale_of_two_probes_and_the_fbi_120083.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">I learned the FBI was given documents<\/a> that may have further explained what was going on:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI&rsquo;s case files for the &ldquo;Midyear Exam,&rdquo; its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton&rsquo;s tenure as the nation&rsquo;s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a &ldquo;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/eric-adams-and-trump-share-legal-windfalls-from-supreme-court-washington-examiner\/\" title=\"Eric Adams and Trump share leg... windf...ls from Supreme Court ... Washington Examiner\">quid pro quo&#038;rdquo<\/a>; to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman&nbsp;Moammar&nbsp;Gadhafi.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers&rsquo; cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Those documents, obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, were given directly to the Deputy Assistant Director of the&nbsp;FBI&rsquo;s Counterintelligence Division in 2016 &mdash; right around the same time that Hillary Clinton&rsquo;s associates were shopping a &ldquo;dossier&rdquo; on Trump&rsquo;s ties to Russia. I don&rsquo;t think I have to tell you which of these two foreign influence investigations into the respective presidential candidates that year was aggressively pursued by Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, and which one developed a case of bureaucratic leprosy.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I hadn&rsquo;t pondered the depths of all this frustratingly ignored and brazen corruption for years. And to finally bring this home, last week it all came flooding back when I remembered a small detail from my report on what went wrong with <em>60 Minutes<\/em>&lsquo; Benghazi report:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A second source very familiar with CBS News operations confirmed Drumheller&rsquo;s behind-the-scenes meddling and told The Weekly Standard that Drumheller&rsquo;s closest relationship at CBS was with 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens. According to New York magazine, Owens was responsible for vetting Logan&rsquo;s story.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Owens was, of course, promoted to being the man completely in charge of <em>60 Minutes<\/em> in 2019, despite the fact he bore direct responsibility for one of the biggest errors in the network&rsquo;s history a few years earlier. Fortunately for him, the blame quickly shifted to Logan, no one asked questions about his relationship to Drumheller, and unlike Rathergate, the mistake helped the Democrat presidential candidate rather than hurt them.<\/p>\n<p>So when <em>60 Minutes<\/em> signed off last week with a hoary tribute to Owens &mdash; &ldquo;his was a quest to open&nbsp;minds, not close them&rdquo; &mdash; and blamed his firing on unethical corporate overlords, I nearly did a spit take. I&rsquo;m sure he was responsible for a lot of valuable journalism over the years, and to some degree the world of high stakes network news is always going to be defined by corporate politics and superficial appeals for the sake of ratings. But I still fail to see how the likes of Bill Owens did one thing during decades of constant reputational damage to make me think that <em>60 Minutes<\/em> cared about the facts above all else.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/heminator\">@heminator<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bill Owens, executive producer of CBS&#8217; 60 Minutes, resigned last week, citing threats to his journalistic independence. The show&#8217;s first episode after his resignation featured a controversial tribute to him that quickly went viral<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274,"featured_media":2430098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/60-minutes.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[42153,36355,54468,54469],"class_list":["post-2430097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-60-minutes","tag-investigative-journalism","tag-media-scandal","tag-news-history"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/60-minutes.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2430097"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2430101,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430097\/revisions\/2430101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2430098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2430097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2430097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2430097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}