Three CNN staff members resigned after a story they worked on regarding Russia and a top Trump adviser was deemed fake news.

Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau and Lex Haris resigned from their positions. CNN claimed to have accepted their resignation.

Lichtblau is the owner of the Pulitzer Prize for publication in the New York Times. He came to CNN only a few months ago as an editor.

Being a highly regarded reporter, he had been working for the New York Times for 15 years.

Lex Harris was the highest-ranking official, he had been working on the channel since 2001. Harris explained that when CNN refused the article, published by his team, he resigned. Nevertheless, he pointed out the 3 main principles: a news service, accuracy, and truthfulness are above everything, as Yahoo quoted Harris's statement.

The matter of deleting

It was a story about the Senate investigation into possible links between one of the representatives of the transition team Donald Trump and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RFPI).

Anthony Scaramuzzi is one of the representatives of Trump's transition team. In the deleted article, CNN, citing a single unnamed source in the Congress, it was reported that the intelligence committee in the Senate is investigating the ties of Scaramuzzi with the RFPI. Particularly, about his meeting with the head of the fund Kirill Dmitriev "just four days before the inauguration" of Trump, on which the cancellation of sanctions against Russia could have been discussed.

The RFPI representative stressed the importance of a number of "factual errors" in the article. For example, it was written that Vnesheconombank oversees the activities of the fund. In fact, in 2016 RFPI became an independent sovereign fund, whose activities with this bank are not connected.

Later, CNN deleted the article, but the BuzzFeed Journalist noted that the journalistic ethics can not handle the removal of materials from the site without explanations.

CNN made a note that the story did not correspond to their editorial standards, that's why it had been removed. Its officials also apologized to Mr. Scaramucci.

The topic of US-Russia ties is still hot

The Congress is making independent investigations about Russian interference in the US presidential elections, won by Donald Trump. The same investigation is going on in the FBI.

The reports about the ties of Trump's members with Russian officials regularly appear in the American press, but as a rule, they refer to unnamed sources.Both the Kremlin and the White House claimed such reports ungrounded.CNN has previously removed materials from the site for "inconsistency with editorial standards.

In February 2014 the channel published a rating of the most "ugly" monuments of the world, including the "Courage" monument to the defenders of the Brest Fortress in Belarus. The public found the description offered by CNN offensive.

As a result, CNN removed the entire rating and apologized to readers, explaining that they did not want to offend anyone's feelings.
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