CNN has had to retract a story about Russian investment funds and possible connections to the Donald Trump campaign, and three staffers involved with the story—including the executive editor of an investigative unit—have resigned.
The story was published on the CNN website but not on air, said the network.
That news triggered some gleeful tweets and retweets from President Donald Trump, who has been branding CNN "fake news" and out to get him for months.
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 tape 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 presstime 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).
(Photo via Josh Hallett's Flickr. Image taken on June 27, 2017 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 9x16 aspect ratio.)
