They will never, ever drop this.
See what the NY Times did with Walter Duranty, a drunk who got the Pulitzer Prize for lying about Soviet Russia, denied there was any famine in Ukraine (it killed 8 million people) and wrote only about the phony Potemkin villages the Bolsheviks created. This “newspaper” has not disavowed the Pulitzer Prize for this weasel.
They can’t, they own it. Without them the story wouldn’t exist.