Three CNN employees have resigned over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia.
CNN broke the news on Monday after CNN removed the article from CNN.com on Friday. The network commented that they could no longer support the story.
On Thursday, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a story centering around an investigation into a Russian investment fund with alleged ties to several of Donald Trump associates. According to CNN, an internal investigation found that some of the company’s employees did not follow CNN’s editorial processes after the journalism team published the report. CNN reportedly used an unnamed source and stated that Congress was reportedly investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.”
CNN later released a statement.“Once it was determined that editorial processes were not followed, CNN deleted the story from CNN.com,” the network reported on their website on Friday. “Soon thereafter, the story was officially retracted and replaced with an editor’s note.”
Moreover, CNN commented that the news report “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled.”
CNN says the mistake was caused by a “breakdown in editorial workflow,” claiming that “these type of stories” do not go through the typical editorial processes, which include fact-checkers, journalism experts, and attorneys.
Ultimately, three people are out of a job including Frank, who wrote the story, Eric Lichtblau, an editor, and the person in charge of the group, Lex Haris.
Frank previously worked as a reporter for USA Today and Newsday before working with CNN. Lichtblau is a former New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and Haris was a former executive editor of CNNMoney.
In a statement, Haris said, “On Friday, CNN retracted a story published by my team. As Executive Editor of that team, I have resigned. I’ve been with CNN since 2001, and am sure about one thing: This is a news organization that prizes accuracy and fairness above all else. I am leaving, but will carry those principles wherever I go.”
CNN’s journalism was caught under fire in the past. In 2014, CNN fired a news editor for repeated plagiarism offenses. An internal investigation found Marie-Louise Gumuchian had published nearly 50 stories containing plagiarized work. Then, in 2012, CNN Host Fareed Zakaria was suspended from both CNN and Time after admitting to plagiarizing parts of a story from the New Yorker.