National Public Radio syndicated talk show host Diane Rehm planted her foot in her mouth with a series of highly inappropriate questions in a recent interview with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-identified democratic Socialist who is seeking the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

During a broadcast June 10 (listen online at bit.ly/1FXGG8U), Rehm asserted that Sanders held dual citizenship with Israel. The senator denied the assertion and said that he has visited the State of Israel only a couple of times.

Rehm then told Sanders that his name was on a list of lawmakers with dual citizenship, to which Sanders replied that he was “offended” by the accusation. He repeated that he does not have Israeli citizenship and attributed the misinformation to “some of the nonsense that goes on in the Internet.”

What was the source of the erroneous information? A listener raised the question about Sanders’ dual citizenship in a comment on the program’s Facebook page. 

Jared Sichel of the Jewish Journal wrote that he found a “dual citizenship” list that included Sanders in the comments section of a different Facebook page. The list, Sichel writes, “is a total fabrication, not to mention created by an anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, which is given away by the fact that it says ‘Jewish Lobby,’ ‘#israelwarcrime,’ ‘AIPAC: Buying Congress one seat at a time,’ ‘Rothschild’ and features an American flag with a Star of David replacing the 50 stars.”

In an article (“Diane Rehm and a Bungled Interview With Senator Bernie Sanders”) posted Friday on the NPR website, NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen takes Rehm and her show’s staff to task for “pulling unsubstantiated information from the Internet.” In doing so, they unwittingly propelled anti-Semitic propaganda to the airways of a respected news platform, giving legitimacy to the anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty. 

Rehm did offer an on-air apology on June 11 for what she characterized to Jensen as a “terrible mistake” in “not realizing that these lists had been put up by anti-Semitic groups.” She also said that none of her producers was aware of the lists or their source. 

While Rehm’s apology was absolutely essential and welcome, it does not excuse her inept journalism in failing to fact-check her sources, which in this case turned out to be anti-Semitic in origin.

Some other prominent American journalists have issued apologies for various infractions, apologies that did not always succeed in putting the controversies to rest.

For example, in a “60 Minutes” segment in 2004, Dan Rather used apparently forged documents purporting to criticize George W. Bush’s record in the Air National Guard. Eventually, the incident led to Rather’s departure from the network. Then there was the case of Juan Williams, a longtime guest commentator on various NPR and network TV shows, who was summarily fired by NPR for stating outside of his radio shows that he gets “nervous” at airports if he sees people dressed in Muslim garb.

Most recently, Brian Williams, the host of “NBC Nightly News,” was given a six-month suspension from his anchor job for having apparently misrepresented the facts of an attack on a helicopter while he was on assignment in Afghanistan.

Juan Williams and Brian Williams both apologized for their on-air comments, and both suffered serious consequences for their statements.

Sanders, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is Jewish, but has never been associated with Zionism. Nothing exists in his record to support a charge of dual citizenship and its evil twin sister, dual loyalty. Anti-Israel forces in America have long accused U.S. Jews of having a “dual loyalty” with the State of Israel, or even of supporting Israel over the United States.

The fact that Rehm failed to fact-check her falsely based claim of Sanders’ dual citizenship is bad enough. But her repeated questioning of Sanders even after he had answered her honestly could be described as bullying, as well as an attempt to plant seeds of doubt about a Jewish lawmaker’s loyalty to his own country.

Rehm would be wise not only to reinforce her on-air apology, but to assure NPR and her listeners that she will not go down this dark path again. As for NPR, it will have to decide whether some kind of reprimand is in order beyond her mea culpa. 

Based on similar cases, it would appear that such an action is warranted.