In a Thursday column, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler took NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff to task for failing to disclose a 2010 donation to the Clinton Foundation: “It is always a bad idea for a journalist to give money to a political campaign or anything even remotely connected to the activities of a politician or party, or an organization that they might cover. You just shouldn’t do it.”
After noting how “really, really, inexplicably bad” it was for ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to give $75,000 to the charity run by his old bosses, Getler added: “It is also not a great idea, in my opinion, for a major TV news program, such as the PBS NewsHour, not to cover in its nightly broadcast what was, for everyone else, a pretty big news story about the news media. And the NewsHour has not provided any on-the-air coverage of the story swirling around Stephanopoulos since it was revealed last Thursday, May 14...”
While Getler praised Woodruff for her “distinguished, 45-year journalistic career,” he declared: “The choice of the Clinton Foundation, even in a small amount and with the best of intentions, was a mistake in my book.”
He concluded: “Was the Woodruff link the reason the NewsHour chose not to cover a story that has generated lots of continuing coverage in The Washington Post, New York Times and many other outlets? It doesn’t look good from where I sit.”
Woodruff issued a statement in response to Getler’s assessment:
I'm a longtime admirer of your work, as a journalist and as ombudsman, but what you wrote was unfair. To lump what I did in 2010 under the simple heading of “Clinton” ignores the facts and the context. I gave $250 two days after the Haiti earthquake struck in 2010, to an emergency relief fund, and in response to one of the first appeals to cross my desk when we were witnessing wall-to-wall scenes of death and devastation. I am a journalist, but I also am a citizen who supports non-partisan, charitable causes when I feel so moved.
I will not be put in a position of defending the Clinton Foundation. But in early January 2010, less than one year into President Obama’s first term, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the tragedy hit and we were told by relief experts that the quickest way to get a contribution to the victims, was through the William J. Clinton Foundation. It had a longstanding involvement in Haiti before the quake. To repeat, my gift was made out to the Haiti Relief Fund, not the general Clinton Foundation.
In reality, some of the worst corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation surround it’s work in Haiti.
(h/t TVNewser)
