CNN has had to retract an online story about Russian investment funds and possible connections to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and three network staffers involved with the story, including the executive editor of an investigative unit, have resigned.
The story was published on CNN's website, but not used on-air, the network said.
CNN's announcement triggered some gleeful tweets and retweets from the president, who for months has been branding CNN as 'fake news' and out to get him.
Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2017
— Jeff (@JeffTutorials) June 26, 2017
Exiting the network were the story's author, Thomas Frank; editor Eric Lichtblau; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, according to CNN Money.
"In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story's publication," CNN said late Monday.
Elsewhere, Project Veritas had posted a video on YouTube purporting to show a CNN Health supervising producer talking about the ratings-driven nature of cable news’ focus on the Russia story. At press time the video had almost 100,000 views (96,044) and was accumulating them at a healthy clip (more than 1,000 new views in less than 30 seconds, for example).
