On Wednesday morning, during Peter Alexander’s 11 a.m. show, MS NOW broke into regular programming to deliver what appeared to be an eye-popping scoop from its newsgathering operation. Justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian told viewers that FBI director Kash Patel had landed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for meetings, citing two anonymous sources.

“We don’t know what Kash Patel is doing in Russia,” Dilanian said, adding that the lack of clarity was “concerning” to FBI sources. “The FBI is not saying anything about this. I asked them for comment on our reporting. They have not gotten back to me.”

The problem: Patel wasn’t in Russia. He was at a law enforcement event some 5,000 miles away, much closer to home, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Just two hours after his initial report, Dilanian returned on air with Alicia Menendez to deliver a significant follow-up to his report. Patel “did not, in fact, land in Russia today and remains in the U.S.,” he said. “We regret this error, and we are transparent about when we make errors.”

Dilanian wasn’t the only journalist to hear the bogus tip. Status has learned that at least one other news outlet was approached with the same claim about Patel, but declined to run it after further investigation. It was unclear who was behind the report, which has left MS NOW embarrassed and facing questions about how an uncorroborated tip cleared its standards process.

But inside the Rebecca Kutler-led network, the painful retraction has prompted a more immediate question: How did such a consequential claim about a notoriously litigious Trump administration official make it onto the air without being properly vetted? I’m told leadership is taking the situation seriously, conducting a review of the reporting and approval process and meeting with the people involved to understand how the error happened.

In the wake of the mess, the network expects to make changes to its editorial workflow, Status has learned, including plans to elevate more reporting to the standards department—which also serves other Versant properties, including CNBC—before it reaches viewers. One person familiar with the process told me that, in this instance, MS NOW’s reporting unit and newsgathering operation handled the process. A network spokesperson did not provide comment for this story.

To be sure, Dilanian’s initial reporting did not come out of nowhere. In July, POLITICO reported that Patel was planning an unusual trip to Russia for various meetings, citing U.S. officials as sources. The outlet said the visit was tentatively scheduled to begin October 14, the same date Dilanian reported Patel had arrived in the country. In the months following POLITICO’s initial report, the trip drew concern from government officials, particularly given the strained relationship between Washington and the Kremlin amid the war in Ukraine. By early October, senior House Democrats were campaigning for Patel to abandon his plans. The FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment about Patel’s travel plans, but the earlier reporting might help explain why the tip may have seemed credible to Dilanian, a veteran justice and intelligence reporter. Dilanian didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In any case, the network moved swiftly to issue a correction, in contrast with the latest ABC News bust-up over reporting on Donald Trump’s sons’ investments, where leadership went silent and let those on the defense fill the void with their own explanation. But the speed didn’t exactly blunt the fallout.

“If a network cannot confirm where I was before putting it on air, how can the public trust its reporting on the work our agents and officers do every day?” Patel wrote on X, demanding an apology to the FBI, law enforcement officers, and the American public.

It was a predictable response from Patel, who regularly lashes out at media coverage of his performance leading the FBI and has even filed suit against outlets over their reporting. Notably, Patel’s now-fiancée, Alexis Wilkins, also filed a defamation lawsuit in June against MS NOW’s parent company Versant, as well as Dilanian and reporter Carol Leonnig, after the duo reported that Patel had used FBI resources to escort one of Wilkins’ friends home after a night of partying.

But the timing is particularly consequential given the network’s already complicated relationship with the Trump administration, which recently sought to restrict MS NOW’s access to the White House grounds alongside CNN and POLITICO. And the error gave Patel an opening to cast doubt on the network's broader reporting about his leadership, which Dilanian often covers.

Indeed, the incident also arrives at a delicate point in the nascent newsroom’s evolution. Since formally separating from NBC News late last year, Kutler has undertaken the enormous task of building an independent newsgathering operation, hiring hundreds of journalists, establishing new editorial workflows, and assembling a standards team tailored to the cable network's needs. After relying heavily on NBC News for original reporting, MS NOW has worked to establish itself as an independent destination for breaking news, with reporters pursuing exclusive stories specifically for the cable network’s programming rather than relying on the output of its former broadcast sibling. MS NOW has published stories critical of Patel’s leadership that the FBI has refuted but have not become a full-blown standards crisis for the network.

The transformation has brought considerable advantages, according to staffers who spoke with Status. The new standards operation, I’m told, is more closely aligned with MS NOW's editorial mission than the previous structure at NBC News. Staffers described fewer disagreements over content and greater flexibility to pursue stories tailored to the network's audience, without navigating the broader institutional concerns of a broadcast behemoth. They also described the network as more agile and faster to get things to air, rather than being bogged down by a broadcast network’s bureaucracy.

But those advantages also bring challenges. One staffer characterized the retraction as an example of the “growing pains” that can accompany building a news organization from scratch, describing an operation that can sometimes resemble a corporate startup. But the staffer also acknowledged the particularly unfortunate circumstances of this mistake: “Kash Patel is a bad guy to get it wrong with.”

Indeed, even the swift correction has not entirely eliminated concerns about how the inaccurate report made it to air, or what consequences might follow. Some staffers told Status they anticipated repercussions for those involved, potentially including Dilanian.

As of Sunday, the correspondent had not published a new story since Wednesday morning, before his erroneous report, and had not appeared on air since issuing the correction, though I’m told there’s no disciplinary mandate involved in his absence.

The latest episode of Power Lines is out.

You won’t want to miss this week’s episode: We feature exclusive audio from an explosive meeting inside CBS News, as Bari Weiss’ handpicked foreign editor, Shayndi Raice, clashed with reporters, threatened to fire them for “insubordination,” told a veteran correspondent she got her own story wrong, and called the Gaza death toll a “magic number.” Plus, we break down our reporting on why Lesley Stahl nearly quit “60 Minutes.”

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