At CNN, Retracted Story Leaves an Elite Reporting Team Bruised
Late
on a Monday afternoon in June, members of CNN’s elite investigations
team were summoned to a fourth-floor room in the network’s glassy
headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.
A
top CNN executive, Terence Burke, had startling news: three of their
colleagues, including the team’s executive editor, were leaving the
network in the wake of a retracted article
about Russia and a close ally of President Trump. Effective
immediately, Mr. Burke said, the team would stop publishing stories
while managers reviewed what had gone wrong.
It was a chilling moment for a unit that boasted Pulitzer Prize winners and superstar internet sleuths, and had been introduced at the beginning of the year as the vanguard of CNN’s original, high-impact reporting. Its mission statement —
“Seek truth. Break news. Hold the powerful accountable.” — invoked the
sort of exhaustive reporting that has become an increasingly coveted
skill for news organizations in the Trump era.
But within months of its introduction, the unit, CNN Investigates, had been rocked by damaging reporting errors — including another flawed story
about Mr. Trump and Russia earlier in June — and its mistakes had
disturbed network executives who were already embroiled in a public feud
with the White House.
The retracted story and ignominious exits of three prominent journalists was an embarrassing episode for CNN ...
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