U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday blasted CNN after its three staffers resigned over a retracted story connecting a top Trump proponent to a Russian investment fund.
"Wow, CNN had to retract big story on 'Russia,' with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!," Trump tweeted.
"Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!" the president said.
"CNN just posted it's most-watched second quarter in history. Those are the facts," the CNN Communications account responded shortly afterwards.
The cable TV network on Thursday published a story saying that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee was probing Trump campaign adviser Anthony Scaramucci for allegedly meeting with a Russian investor days before Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, citing an anonymous source.
CNN took down the story one day after, saying it did not meet editorial standards and offered an apology to Scaramucci, which was promptly accepted. The network, though, has not explicitly said the story was inaccurate.
An internal CNN probe reportedly found normal editorial processes weren't followed in the stories editing and publication. Thomas Frank, the author of the story, Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the CNN investigative unit that ran the story, and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN, the network said Monday.
Trump frequently hits on CNN and refers to stories from the network as "fake news." On Tuesday, he also retweeted a graphic of CNN's logo, changed to read "FNN" or "Fake News Network."
The increase of CNN's daytime audience more than doubled and its prime-time audience jumped 70 percent last year during Trump's presidential campaign.
"Presdient Trump and CNN both needed a correction Tuesday morning during a Twitter spat in their long-running, mutually beneficial public feud", Jason Silverstein with the New York Daily News commented.
