Retracted story leaves CNN’S 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news: three of their colleagues, including the team’s executive editor, were leaving the network in the wake of a retracted article about Russia and a close ally of President Donald Trump. Effective immediately, 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 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 were an embarrassing episode for CNN, particularly at a time when there was widespread mistrust in the media and Trump was regularly attacking the press. Two months later, it remains an illuminating