A senior PBS correspondent apologized Wednesday for incorrectly telling viewers that former President Trump tried to convince Israel to end a ceasefire as the war in Gaza continued.
Judy Woodruff shifted the blame for the gaffe, stating “unequivocally” that she ran the unsubstantiated scoop based on outside reports she read before broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Monday.
“Former President Trump reportedly spoke to the Israeli prime minister on the phone and urged him not to make a deal right now because he thought it would favor the Harris campaign,” Woodruff said during a PBS roundtable discussion.
“No one knows if that will happen, but I’m sure the Harris team wants President Biden to do what he has to do as president, which is to go after that.”
Woodruff received a lot of backlash online for her comments, much of it from people who pointed out that the rumors she cited had been debunked just days before she repeated them live on air.
On Wednesday, the former “NewsHour” host said he “wanted to clarify” his comments about ongoing ceasefire talks.
“As I said before, this is not based on my original reporting. I was referring to reports I read in Axios and Reuters that former President Trump spoke with the Israeli prime minister,” Woodruff wrote to X.
“I repeated it live on air because I had not seen the subsequent reports that both sides had denied the allegations. This was a mistake and I apologize.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that Woodruff’s comments were a “complete lie.”
The Axios article Woodruff mentioned was published on August 14 and cited two sources who claimed that President Trump, 78, spoke by phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu, 74, about the Gaza hostage crisis and the ceasefire agreement.
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Reuters reprinted the story on its website, but neither report said that Trump urged Netanyahu to delay the deal.
The day after the article was published, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office released a statement denying that a phone call had taken place between the prime minister and President Trump.
That same day, both Axios and Reuters published new articles reflecting the new denials — four days before Woodruff repeated the false information to a live audience.
PBS did not respond to messages from The Washington Post.
However, Trump claims to have spoken with Netanyahu.
The Republican presidential candidate claimed at a press conference that he had urged the prime minister to end the war, but criticised the terms of the proposed ceasefire.
“He knows what he’s doing. I urge him to finish this,” Trump said.
“We need to end this quickly. We need to win and end it. The killing needs to stop.”
