-By Warner Todd Huston
One of the earliest reporters revealing the internal emails about Benghazi exchanged between the U.S. Department of State and the intel community was CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson. Her original report was based on “written notes” and, as she said from the beginning, was not derived directly from the emails themselves. Despite this disclaimer, some called her reckless for her reporting. But in the end her reports are still quite close to the actual emails and shows she did not get the story wrong.
Attkisson was accused of not disclosing that her report was written from congressional insiders that gave her access to notes taken after they had been given access in Committee to the actual emails. To put to rest the accusations against Attkisson, Mediaite obtained an internal CBS memo that shows that she never claimed that her report was derived directly from the emails themselves.
When Attkisson handed in her original report on the email exchange, she clearly noted that her work was based on notes taken by her sources.
Note: *Emails were provided by the Administration to certain Congressional Committees for limited review. The Committees were not permitted to copy the emails, so they made handwritten notes. Therefore, parts of the quoted emails may be paraphrased.
This notation, however, did not make it to the May 10 story CBS posted to the web, nor was it pointed out on any of the CBS TV reports on the story.
No explanation was given for that lapse.
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Gov’t Memo Proves CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson Got Benghazi Email Story Right”