“Our reputation is everything; that is our currency, and that’s why we have processes in place,” Mr. Zucker said, according to the employee. He added, “If you don’t follow those procedures, you don’t work here, period.”

Those procedures broke down last week, according to several people at CNN who, in speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, recounted a scramble inside the network after the story was published last Thursday.

The article, written by the veteran reporter Thomas Frank, linked Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The reporting was attributed to an anonymous source.

The Triad system should have kicked into gear, with reviews by lawyers, a standards-and-practices division, and an editorial team known collectively as the Row, which checks facts and approves anonymous sources. (The system is so ingrained that CNN journalists often use the term as a verb: as in, has the story been “rowed”?)

But several network officials were caught off-guard when the story appeared online, the people said, signaling that it had not received the proper approvals.

CNN has not specified what, if anything, in the story was untrue, only saying that the piece did not meet its editorial standards. On Tuesday, the network declined to explain the exact nature of how its procedures went awry.

The mistake came at a sensitive time. Like other news channels, CNN’s ratings are up compared with last year, but on weeknights, the network has fallen behind its rivals Fox News and MSNBC in prime time. In the past month, CNN cut ties with the broadcast personalities Kathy Griffin and Reza Aslan after they publicly assailed Mr. Trump in vulgar ways.