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Whoopi Goldberg has been taken off ABC's The View daytime talk show for her comments on the Holocaust on Monday. The show co-host apologised on Tuesday for her comments – which came after a local school board banned the graphic novel Maus – and caused a furore.
Goldberg, 66, said during a broadcast of The View on Monday that the Holocaust was "not about race" because it involved "white people doing it to white people."
CNN reporter Oliver Darcy said on Twitter on Tuesday evening that Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, had told staff in a note that Goldberg would be suspended so she could "take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments."
The New York Times also reported Godwin's note.
Goldberg and the other women who host The View were discussing the Holocaust after a school board in Tennessee voted to remove Maus, by Art Spiegelman, from its eighth-grade language arts curriculum. The McMinn County Schools officials cited profanity and nudity in the Pulitzer Prize-winning work.
Goldberg's comments faced criticism by activists online for being dangerous.
"No Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust was about the Nazis' systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race," Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said on Twitter in response to the comments.
"They dehumanised them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering six million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous," Greenblatt said.
Goldberg apologised later on Monday during an appearance on The Late Show, and again on the next broadcast of The View on Tuesday morning.
"Yesterday on our show, I misspoke. I tweeted about it last night but I want you to hear it from me directly," she said. "I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined, because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful, and it helped me understand some different things.
"I said the Holocaust wasn't about race and was instead about man's inhumanity to man. But it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.
"Now, words matter and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people as they know and y'all know, because I've always done that."