Dr Mehmet Oz was corrected live on air after he made false claims that his opponent John Fetterman wanted to end life imprisonment as his first political priority.
The pro-Trump Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat is trailing his Democratic rival for the open seat with less than a month left before election day.
He was fact-checked about his claim about Mr Fetterman during an interview with Dasha Burns on NBC News.
“When John Fetterman is asked, ‘If you could wave a magic wand, what’s the one thing you would do?’… he says, ‘Well, I’d get rid of life in prison,’” claimed Dr Oz.
But Burns, who had just interviewed Mr Fetterman, called him out on the inaccurate claim.
“I asked him that. He actually said it would be codifying Roe v Wade and abolishing the filibuster,” she responded.
Earlier this week Mr Fetterman, 53, gave Ms Burns his first interview since having a stroke in May, and conducted it with closed captioning because of the auditory processing issues he is still suffering from.
Burns was widely criticised when she stated that “in small talk – before the interview, without captioning – it wasn’t clear (Fetterman) was understanding our conversation”.
Podcaster and business reporter Kara Swisher, who had a stroke in 2011, branded the claims by Burns as “just nonsense”.
“Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk,” she tweeted.
