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news: three of their colleagues, including the team’s executive editor, were leaving the network in the wake of a retracted article about Russia and a close ally of President Trump.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 storyabout 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, particularly at a time when there was widespread mistrust in the media and Mr. Trump was regularly attacking the press. Two months later it remains an illuminating chapter in the network’s effort to carry out the meticulous, time-consuming work of investigative journalism within the fast-paced, ratings-driven world of 24-hour cable news.
Questions linger about the way CNN handled the publication of the story and the retraction. The network’s swift and severe response drew coverage throughout the media world, and prompted some journalists to questionwhether CNN had bowed to political pressure and overreacted on a story it has never explicitly said was wrong. Instead, the network maintains there had been unacceptable breakdowns in the newsroom’s internal review process.
In interviews with The New York Times, more than half a dozen CNN staff members, including three with direct knowledge of the investigative unit’s operations, provided previously unreported details about the publication of the story and the fallout from its retraction. Citing fear of retribution, the people requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal information.
In the weeks since the story was retracted, the investigative team has been reshaped and redirected. Its members were told they should not report on perhaps the most compelling political story of the year: potential ties between the Trump administration and Russia. That subject is now largely handled by CNN’s reporting team in Washington. The political whizzes of KFile, a group of Internet-savvy reporters poached from BuzzFeed that was untainted by the retraction, were transferred out of the investigative team.
The remaining team members have resumed publishing, but with a narrower reporting scope; they now focus on topics less glamorous than Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia, like the opioid crisis and the environment.
Created to enhance CNN’s brand, the group had instead left it bruised, and the mistakes intensified the onslaught of attacks against CNN from Mr. Trump. Looming over the newsroom was a pending $85 billion takeover of CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, by AT&T, a deal requiring Justice Department approval that some White House aides considered a potential form of leverage against the network and its president, Jeffrey A. Zucker.
CNN said its commitment to aggressive reporting remains undiminished, and other anchors and correspondents have continued to break stories about the Trump administration and Russia. Late last month the network revealed an email from a Trump campaign aide discussing a potential meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, during last year’s presidential race.
Want to see the disconnect here read the comment picks by the editors at the Times and then read the reader picks.... Quite the contrast.
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