(Credit: NYTimes)

Earlier this month, Agenda, a news service from the Financial Times, unpublished quotes attributed to ousted CBS CEO Les Moonves after Moonves said he never did an interview with the site. Agenda published the alleged interview back in December.

Before Agenda’s editor’s note acknowledging Moonves’ denial, many news outlets picked up and re-published the quotes in question though. Now that Agenda has removed the quotes, the New York Times added an editor’s note acknowledging the problems with the quotes.

The Times’ Jan. 11 editors’ note reads:

The Common Sense column on Dec. 19 about Les Moonves, the ousted chief executive of CBS, and his rights under his termination agreement to sue the broadcast company for breach of contract, included remarks from an interview published in December in Agenda, an industry publication, that were attributed to Mr. Moonves. The validity of the Agenda interview has since been called into question. On Thursday, Agenda removed Mr. Moonves’s commentsand published an editor’s note that stated, in part, that a representative for Mr. Moonves issued a statement denying that Mr. Moonves spoke with reporters from Agenda. The thrust of the column — that CBS is obliged to pay Mr. Moonves’s legal bills should he decide to sue the company — is accurate and unchanged, but the excerpted comments from the Agenda article have been removed from the online version of the column and an accompanying picture caption.