Abby Phillip, one of CNN’s prime-time hosts, corrected comments she made on the air Tuesday night about what police say was an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New York City earlier this week.
As the host teased a segment going into a commercial break, Phillip said “Two [elected] Republicans say Muslims don’t belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson [R-La.], says nothing, really, to condemn those comments.”
In a social media post on Wednesday morning, Phillip wrote, “I want to correct something I said last night.”
“The bombs thrown in New York City over the weekend by ISIS inspired attackers was thrown into a crowd of anti-Muslim protestors and not specifically targeted at Mayor Mamdani,” she said. “That wording was inaccurate, and I didn’t catch it ahead of time. I apologize for the error.”
The correction came just hours after the outlet took heat from online critics over its framing of a story on the attack in a social media post it later deleted. CNN said its original framing “failed to reflect the gravity of the incident thereby breaching the editorial standards we require for all our reporting.”
