“PBS NewsHour” co-anchor Judy Woodruff on Friday responded to a post from PBS ombudsman Michael Getler calling her donations to an initiative by the Clinton Foundation “a mistake.”
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.
On Thursday, Getler wrote a post that called into question Woodruff’s decision to make a donation to the Haiti Relief Fund shortly after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country. He said she erred in making the donation, “even in a small amount and with the best of intentions.”
Woodruff’s donation to the Clinton Foundation charity — and contributions from several others in the media — came to light after it was revealed that ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation to fight AIDS and deforestation.
Comments