NEW YORK — CNN on Friday had to correct a story that suggested Donald Trump’s campaign had been tipped off early about WikiLeaks documents damaging to Hillary Clinton when it later learned the alert was about material already publicly available.
The new information, CNN noted, “indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.”
It’s the second mistake in a week by a major news organization on a story that initially had been damaging to the president but didn’t live up to scrutiny, giving Trump ammunition for his campaign against “fake news.”
The story, by CNN reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, was posted Friday morning and said that an email was sent to Trump and campaign officials Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to documents from the Democratic National Committee hacked by WikiLeaks.
Five hours later, The Washington Post reported that the message had actually been sent on Sept. 14 and it wasn’t a tip to secret documents, since WikiLeaks had released them a day earlier.
CNN corrected its story almost eight hours later with the new information.
At a rally in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday evening, Trump pointed to the CNN correction as well as other corrections and clarifications issued by news organizations over the past week.
“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump asked the crowd. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
Trump singled out suspended ABC reporter Brian Ross, calling him a “fraudster” and saying he should have been fired because his error caused a dip in the stock market. “I said to everybody: Get yourself a lawyer and sue ABC News,” Trump said.
Trump also told the rowdy crowd that CNN had apologized “just a little while ago” for its reporting error.
“They apologized! Oh thank you, CNN. Thank you so much. You should have been apologizing for the last two years,” he said.
CNN said its original account that the email was released 10 days earlier was based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email.
There’s no indication that CNN plans to discipline Raju and Herb, meaning it blames the error on its sources more than its reporters.