Lara Logan returns to work at ’60 Minutes’ after leave of absence

“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan is back at work after a lengthy leave of absence.

As first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, Logan and her producer Max McClellan have returned to the esteemed CBS newsmagazine more than six months after an erroneous report aired about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

A CBS representative confirmed that Logan had returned from leave, but did not address when she would be back on the air on “60 Minutes” or other CBS News programs.

In the Oct. 27 Benghazi segment, Logan interviewed Dylan Davies, a security contractor who provided a gripping eyewitness account of the attack, one that later turned out to be almost entirely fabricated.

Logan initially defended the report, but as it emerged that Davies has supplied a very different account to his employers at the security agency Blue Mountain and to the FBI and State Department, Logan was forced into retreat. It also did not help that Davies, using a pseudonym, had written a book published by Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of the CBS-owned Simon & Schuster, a potential conflict of interest that was not disclosed on air.

Logan appeared on “CBS This Morning” and “60 Minutes” to apologize for the flawed story, which CBS News Chairman and “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager called “as big a mistake as there has been” in the history of the program.

An internal review at CBS concluded that the inconsistencies between Davies’ versions of events were “knowable before the piece aired,” and Logan was put on leave in late November. As of last month, when New York magazine published a scathing piece about Logan and the bungled Benghazi report, her fate at the network remained unclear.

News of Logan’s return has already provoked anger from some who feel that the correspondent has not been held accountable in the same way that ousted CBS News anchor Dan Rather was for the so-called “memogate” scandal in 2004.

“CBS indicated that they were serious about rebuilding its brand and taking accountability. Having Logan back on ’60 Minutes’ shows the exact opposite,” said David Brock, founder of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, in a statement released Wednesday.