On Thursday, CNN published a story about Trump ally and transition team member Anthony Scaramucci having serious ties to Russia. On Friday, CNN deleted that story, and late on Friday night (10:44 PM EST, prime time baby) issued a statement apologizing for it.

Scaramucci initially defended himself and chirped CNN a bit, but then accepted their apology after the retraction.

CNN bosses are pissed. An internal memo went out Saturday cracking down on how Russia-related content will now be handled.

And Buzzfeed cites an anonymous “source close to the network” (our favorite type of source these days) as telling the listicle machine this was a “massive, massive fuck up and people will be disciplined.”

The Buzzfeed piece went on:

The person said CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker and the head of the company’s human resources department are “directly involved” in an internal investigation examining how the story was handled.

Bad look for CNN. And not simply because of the story and the retraction. Actually, that shit happens quite frequently and CNN handled it pretty standardly (we’ve had Fox, the NYT, and CNN themselves all issue pretty major retractions recently). CNN published something, investigated their own publishing, determined it was below their standards, deleted the story and publicly acknowledged and apologized for the mistake (albeit at 11pm on a Friday night).

The problem is that you can’t fuck up on the most sensitive of issues, during the most sensitive and ramped up political/media relations climate we’ve ever seen. They blew it on a Trump/Russia story when EVERYONE is relentlessly battling over whether the Trump/Russia stuff is complete bullshit or not (or a “witch hunt” or “very fake news,” as Donnie calls it).

Speaking of “fake news,” here’s a good example of why this is such a damaging mistake for CNN. They unnecessarily opened themselves up to another round of hits from their haters. Breitbart News is ALL OVER pouncing on the opportunity to hammer their foes.

In this one article, Breitbart wrote “fake news” 8 different times. You can’t simply give your enemies that kinda fuel and CNN knows it. Hence, they’ve admitted it was a huge mistake and are tightening the screws on Russia-related stuff. Probably a good idea — under this type of microscope, you can’t afford a “massive fuck up” on Trump/Russia stuff.