We’re tracking how the Media Research Center has ramped up its hostility toward public broadcasting to match that of the new Trump administration, which actually mostly consists of whining that PBS and NPR are not clones of Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Here’s how PBS and NPR were attacked in February:
PBS
- PBS Switches Sides on Snowden to Roast ‘Dangerous’ Tulsi Gabbard
- MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Goes Crazy on PBS: Impose ‘Statutory Limit’ on Screen Time?
- PBS Hosts Beinart’s Hamas Apologia: Jews Not ‘History’s Permanent, Virtuous Victims’
- PBS Publicists Promote ACLU Lawsuit Advocating ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Kids
- After Indulging Unilateral Biden, PBS Frets Over Strongman Trump, ‘Guardrails’
- PBS Weekend Mangles History: Only Jim Crow Racists Are Against DEI?
- Free Press Foils PBS’s DEI Deception: Did Network Try to Skirt Trump Executive Order?
- PBS: Trump Capping NIH Payments ‘Sent Chills…Through Scientific Community’
- David Brooks Is Exhibit A in PBS Avoiding Real Conservatives (Tim Graham column)
- Elitist Krugman: Low-Income Trumpers Lack ‘Sophisticated View’ on Economics (PBS interview)
- PBS Mourns a Month Of ‘Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism’
- PBS Celebrates FBI Killer Peltier, ‘Political Prisoner…Global Symbol for Human Rights’
- PBS Smears Musk Again: Colleagues ‘Concerned About Musk’s Mental Health And Drug Use’
- PBS’s Nawaz Seethes at Rare Conservative Guest: ‘You Don’t Believe Gay People Exist?’
- NewsBusters Podcast: PBS and NPR Lose Their Minds Over Musk and His CPAC Chainsaw
- PBS Defends IRS From Trump Firings: Will Help ‘Ultra-Wealthy’ Evade Taxes
NPR
- NPR Helps MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Trash Trump, ‘Attention Capitalism’
- NPR Weeps Over Federal Workers Having to Go Into Work Five Days a Week
- More Reasons to Defund NPR: The Nazis Went After Transgenders, Too
- ASMA ATTACK! NPR Reporter Asma Khalid Rips Elon Musk as a Killer Across Networks
- NPR Is National Public Relations for the War on Trump (Tim Graham column)
- DC NPR Story Stars Dumped USAID Staffers Trashing ‘Evil’ Trump Actions
- Lame-Brained NPR Can’t Identify Any ‘Extremism’ on the Leftist Side
- NewsBusters Podcast: Trying NOT to Yell at NPR’s CEO Dismissing Bias
Of course, the MRC cheered governmental attacks on funding for public broadcasting. Graham gushed over one attack in a Feb. 4 post:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is scaring the liberal media by demanding a hearing into the journalistic tilt at PBS and NPR before the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on government efficiency.
[…]“Public” broadcasting should labor intensely to be the most balanced branch of the media, since all taxpaying Americans fund it. They don’t see it that way, even though they preposterously claim they’re currently impartial.
Graham has never demanded impartiality from, say, Fox News, even though it claims to be “fair and balanced.” Instead, he whined that “NPR doesn’t take conservative criticism seriously, assuming that no conservatives are regular listeners, so their reaction is ‘disingenuous.'” Graham is the foremost (or at least the most vocal) right-wing critic of NPR, so he’s feeling a little butthurt about that assessment.
In presumed revenge for that assessment, Graham also put out a video on Feb. 5 claiming to outline “FIVE Reasons to Defund ‘Public’ Broadcasting.” A lot of it is whining that public broadcasting does stories on people who aren’t heterosexual, the irrelevant whine that there the largest private radio station owner, iHeartRadio, has fewer radio stations than public broadcasting, which ignores that some stations are linked to cover a large geographic area with the same programming; in Nebraska, for example, 10 radio stations carry the same programming feed to cover nearly the entire state.
In a Feb. 25 post, Graham touted that “The Media Research Center launched its ‘Defund PBS & NPR’ campaign Tuesday with a digital mobile billboard driven on roads around the Capitol and House and Senate office buildings calling for defunding,” adding that the MRC had launched a website to collect signatures in support of defunding. Graham offered no evidence that billboard truck or petition websites are effective means of politicking but he made sure to add that “I was also thrilled to discuss the Defund PBS & NPR campaign on Tuesday morning with Larry O’Connor and Julie Gunlock on “O’Connor & Co.” on WMAL-FM.”