‘Leave of Absence’ for Lara Logan After Flawed Benghazi Report

The moves come after weeks of criticism directed at a “60 Minutes” report which was based on an interview with a hired security agent, Dylan Davies, whose comments to CBS News were later discredited.

CBS did not specify the length of the leave of absence for its two staff members, nor whether they would continue to be paid. In general, television correspondents do not lose salary unless they are suspended.

Beyond Ms. Logan, who has been a rising star at CBS News, the review could have implications for the leadership of Jeffrey Fager, the chairman of CBS News, who is also the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” Mr. Fager sent an email to the staff on Tuesday, saying: “As executive producer, I am responsible for what gets on the air. I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have.”

He added: “We are making adjustments at ’60 Minutes’ to reduce the chances of it happening again.”

Mr. Fager has enjoyed a strong reputation both inside and outside CBS News division for emphasizing a hard news approach on the network’s news programs, but one fallout from the discredited report may be continued questions about his dual role as both the top executive at CBS News and the person in charge of its highest-rated, most profitable and best-known program, “60 Minutes.”

One area likely to be examined is the potential addition of a specific executive, outside of the program itself, who would vet the pieces about to be presented on “60 Minutes.” That position existed for years inside CBS News, headed most recently by Linda Mason. But after Ms. Mason retired from the network at the start of 2013, that level of oversight over “60 Minutes” was eliminated.

The review of the Benghazi segment, conducted by CBS News’s executive director of standards and practices, Al Ortiz, was unstinting in its evaluation of the report, which Mr. Ortiz called “deficient in several respects.”

Perhaps chief among the deficiencies, according to Mr. Ortiz’s review, was that the account Mr. Davies gave to Ms. Logan and Mr. McClellan differed from versions he had provided both to his employer, Blue Mountain, and to the F.B.I. This discrepancy, Mr. Ortiz writes, “was knowable before the piece aired.”

In a previous interview with The New York Times, Mr. Fager said CBS had tried talking to the F.B.I. in advance of the report in an effort to determine what Mr. Davies had told the agency. The network’s sources led the program to believe that the account given to the F.B.I. was “in sync” with the interview Mr. Davies gave to “60 Minutes,” Mr. Fager said.

In defense of its report, CBS said earlier that it had been duped by Mr. Davies. Mr. Ortiz contradicted that by saying CBS could have, and should have, been able to verify Mr. Davies’s account before presenting him as a reliable source.

“The wider reporting resources of CBS News were not employed in an effort to confirm his account,” Mr. Ortiz wrote. He concluded: “Logan and producer Max McClellan told me they found no reason to doubt Davies’s account and found no holes in his story. But the team did not sufficiently vet Davies’s account of his own actions and whereabouts that night.”

The report also criticizes Ms. Logan for not adequately substantiating her conclusion that Al Qaeda took part in the attack and for making a speech in October 2012 that took a position on the attack, and then participating in a story in which she would have been expected to be objective about the facts of the attack.