Media Research Center writer Clay Waters spent a good part of last year echoing his employer’s transphobia as part of the MRC’s war on public broadcasting. That continued in an Oct. 22 post:
PBS News Weekend aired yet another story Sunday on suicides by “LGBTQ-plus” teenagers allegedly due to callous Republicans passing laws “targeting transgender people.” Openly gay anchor John Yang and other members of the PBS News crew regularly push the emotional blackmail claim that gender dysphoric kids are at higher risk of suicide, which is exactly the scary message the gender identity extremists want to spread.
Yang left no doubt in the show introduction that the upcoming segment would be far from balanced and objective, as required by the Public Broadcasting Service’s mandate from Congress:
[…]It’s yet more propaganda issued by the Trevor Project, then filtered into the taxpayer-funded mainstream news cycle by PBS News Weekend, which is becoming a home for radical stories like this, as if children are killing themselves because they are referred to by the “wrong” pronoun.
Waters didn’t explain why not hating LGBTQ people is “propaganda,” while his (and his employer’s) homophobia and transphobia is somehow not, or why it should be considered “balanced and objective” to hate them as much as he does.
Waters went on to sneer that reporter Ali Rogin is a “supposed journalist” and whined that she “sounded like a knee-jerk activist all the way through, not even considering the argument against boys allowed access to girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and athletic spaces.” He added that “It’s safe to say neither [Trevor Project CEO Jaymes] Black or Ali are rooting for Trump.” But Waters is, of course.
In an Oct. 24 post, Waters raged that PBS told the truth about Republican fearmongering about transgender people:
The PBS News Hour led off two nights in a row with campaign trail reports from Laura Barron-Lopez, their most partisan reporter.
Anchor Geoff Bennett set the scene Monday evening, with Donald Trump in North Carolina on a post-hurricane Helene trip and Kamala Harris touring with former Republican congresswoman and famed anti-Trumper Liz Cheney. The story’s online headline did much of the work: “Harris campaigns with Liz Cheney as Trump again deploys dark and anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
Laura Barron-Lopez cooed over and hyped up the bipartisan love-fest.
[…]Barron-Lopez also led the PBS News Hour newscast the following Tuesday evening, with a report that began objectively but quickly descended into fear-mongering.
Waters did not prove anything PBS aired to be false. Instead, he spun it to assert that only Democrats are talking about this:
Yet the party’s obsession with LGBT issues is a genuine electoral problem for Democrats, as party pollster Celinda Lake told The New Yorker: “People believe that we are constantly bringing it up, that we care about it more than the economy.”
Harris indeed noted her support for transgender surgery for federal inmates on a 2019 candidate questionnaire sponsored by the ACLU while she was running for president, a fact PBS didn’t bother to mention, desperate as the tax-funded network is to normalize such surgeries, even for teenagers.
Nobody’s forcing every teenager to have such surgeries, as Waters apparently believes.
Waters had one more trans-bashing post before the election, a Nov. 4 piece again whining that right-wing transphobia was accurately described and exposed:
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for TV public-affairs programs, insisted upon “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” But that’s not what we’ve gotten It’s a grand deception made all the more clear in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
One candidate, Donald Trump, has been constantly attacked for several months leading up to the election on the weekday PBS News Hour. A separate half-hour show, PBS News Weekend, often runs evergreen-type stories that aren’t political news. But this weekend’s episodes also attacked Trump on several social issue fronts without any conservative rebuttal.
Anchor John Yang teased a story at top of Saturday’s show that carried the online title “Why anti-transgender political ads are dominating the airwaves this election.“
Waters then attacked a transgender activist who appeared in the segment, calling her “radical” without proof:
Then she introduced Erin Reed, a biological man and radical transgender activist, as “an advocate and independent journalist covering LGBTQ issues” and noted that she had recently endorsed (shocker!) Vice President Kamala Harris – perhaps PBS’s pathetic idea of disclosure, to go along Reed being PBS’s objective and balanced source on a controversial news topic.
Reed said she had “tracked around $100 million in ads” by Republicans.
When asked why “Trump and his allies are making this one of their main closing arguments,” Reed responded:
Reed: ….this is a classic fear campaign….And so the purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you`re willing to throw everything else away because you`re scared.
At least PBS aired part of an actual GOP ad, although only to invite Reed to deflate its points.
Waters didn’t ‘dispute the accuracy of anything Reed said. instead, he rehashed an old MRC atack on her: “Reed also appeared on the PBS News Hour in March 2023 to discuss the tragically misnamed “gender-affirming care” for children, a few months after comparing GOP opposition to genital surgery and hormone therapy as “ongoing anti-trans genocide” on X.”
Waters concluded by calling this a “LGBTQ propaganda piece” — but the only propaganda we see is from Waters and his fellow right-wing transphobes.