LGBT Rights North Carolina

Two protesters hold up signs against passage of legislation in North Carolina, which limits the bathroom options for transgender people, during a rally in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday, March 31, 2016. The rally drew around 100 people at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center. (AP Photos/Skip Foreman)

(Skip Foreman/AP)

Sometimes we make the kind of mistake at cleveland.com that requires an explanation and apology to our audience, and we did just that over the weekend involving a fake news item about the NBA threatening to move its All-Star Game out of North Carolina.

We did several things wrong involving this fake story, but before I get into that, I want to assure you that we are using this episode to re-educate our staff about some journalism basics. We value the trust you place in us when you visit our site, and we know better than to put that trust into jeopardy.

So here's what happened.

North Carolina, you likely have heard, has invited a storm of protest involving a new law that bans local governments from passing legislation to stop businesses from discriminating against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also requires transgender people to use bathrooms of the gender shown on their birth certificates.

Groups are canceling travel to North Carolina in protest, and Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert there over the weekend. The Associated Press has reported developments as they have occurred, and we've published some of them on cleveland.com.

Then, over the weekend, someone created a site that carefully mimicked the ABC news website and included a fake story about the NBA threatening to pull next year's All Star Game out of Charlotte in protest of North Carolina's new law. At cleveland.com, we saw that story, believed it to be real and decided to post the news on our website.

That was our first mistake. This kind of news rarely is reported by a single national news organization. We should have found other sources, and, finding none, questioned how ABC would be alone in reporting this story. If we had done the basics, we would have figured out pretty quickly that we were seeing an impostor ABC website.

Our second mistake was in how we reported the fake news. We combined it with an Associated Press story about the North Carolina controversy but left the AP byline on what we published. That made it appear that the Associated Press had been duped by the impostor website. That's not fair to the Associated Press, a valued partner for cleveland.com.

We have a pretty strict attribution policy at cleveland.com, so when we use facts reported by the Associated Press, we attribute those facts. When we get information from other sources, we attribute that as well.

We have apologized to the Associated Press, and we apologize to you. We owe you better than what we offered on this story.