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MRC Continued Its Jihad Against Public Broadcasting, Complete With Lame Stunt

Posted on June 10, 2025

We’ve been reviewing the Media Research Center’s year in attacking public broadcasting in anticipation of the Trump administration fulfilling the partisan-driven goal of of cutting off federal funding to it. Here’s how that partisanship looked in March, which again largely involved bashing PBS and NPR for not being right-wing, pro-Trump shills:

PBS

  • PBS Freaks Trump Entering ‘More Sinister Territory’ Amid White House Press Pool Changes
  • PBS News Tries Emotional Blackmail on GOP Budget Chair: Job Loss in Your District?
  • On PBS, Amanpour Goes Kooky on Climate and Hillary and the Handmaid’s Tale ‘Manosphere’
  • PBS: Trump Rifling Through ‘Dictator’s Playbook’ Like Philippine Strongman Duterte
  • PBS Plays Dumb on Why Power-Mad Trump Is Punishing Columbia University
  • PBS Journo Claims ‘Poor and People Of Color’ Will Suffer Most From Education Dept. Closing
  • No Dissent! PBS Stands for Perennial BS on How Earth Has Only Ten Years Left
  • NewsBusters Podcast: LOL at PBS Claiming ‘Public Media Belongs to You’
  • Surprise! Detroit PBS Sells Its Subsidy With Viewer Who’s Donated $$$ to Democrats
  • PBS Pushes ‘Constitutional Crisis,’ Casts Trump as Chair-Hurling Bobby Knight
  • PBS Hosts Hard-Left Hysteric Yale Professor on His Flight From ‘Fascist’ USA to Canada
  • Colbert Tries To Defend PBS By Focusing On Children’s Shows
  • On PBS, Marcus Falsely Accuses Bezos Of Trying ‘To Limit Dissent’ At WashPost

NPR

  • ‘PUBLIC’ Broadcasting Watch: NPR Reporter Tamara Keith Is NOT ‘Independent’
  • WHOA: NPR Host Interviews Greg Gutfeld, Fights With Him Over ‘Racist’ Asian Joke
  • As GOP Talks Defunding, MSNBC Fawns Over Pro-NPR Author Who Compares GOP to Cicadas
  • NPR Chat Show Selects Paranoid Leftist Caller: The GOP Might Rule Forever!
  • ‘PUBLIC’ Broadcasting Watch: NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ Adores Trump Hate from Leftist Media Outlets
  • NPR Hosts Debate — Between Begala Democrats and Nutty AOC Democrats

It took both Tim Graham and Clay Waters to complain in a March 6 post that both PBS and NPR were less than laudatory of a speech to Congress by President Trump:

PBS and NPR know that Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are looking at defunding them, but they inevitably covered Trump’s speech to Congress with their usual anti-Trump tilt.

PBS made one surprising move by inviting former Trump aide Tiffany Smiley on the live broadcast to offer an outnumbered pro-Trump opinion. But the rest was a predictable protest parade:

— Jonathan Capehart twice used the term “festival of meanness” to describe Trump’s speech, and Lisa Desjardins also cited Capehart’s description once. Capehart: “I’m just sort of blown away by the notion that Democrats border on the line of fearmongering, when we just listened to an hour or 45 minutes of fearmongering from the president of the United States.”

[…]

Unlike PBS, NPR didn’t make an attempt to bring in a Republican or pro-Trump viewpoint around the speech. They interviewed two Democrats after the speech.

Graham and Waters did not prove anything reported by either outlet to be wrong, and they offered no explanation for why they suggested that the outlets suck up to Trump to keep from getting defunded. They ended their post by exhorting reader to “Sign the petition to help us defund PBS and NPR.”

Justine Brooke Murray huffed in a post the next day:

Big Bird, Elmo and The Count joined an elderly mob of outgrown hippies in Washington D.C., Thursday to express their outrage over the idea NPR and PBS may no longer be able to force taxpayers to subsidize their state propaganda.

It was an overdone and predictable attempt to pull at heartstrings. If you don’t want the government to fleece you hundreds of millions of dollars annually so PBS can tell you who to vote for, then that apparently means you want to kill Big Bird!

Except there’s one problem: PBS hasn’t owned Big Bird or his clan of puppets since 2015. They work for HBO. In fact, HBO ended its partnership with “Sesame Street” in December, nearly three months prior to Murray’s post (it has since inked a deal with Netflix). Murry then hyped a stunt she was trying to pull:

The Media Research Center arrived at the protest with our own display: The Left-Leaning Tower of Media Bias, a stack of thousands of articles we’ve published, documenting 15 years of yellow journalism peddled by both PBS and NPR. But when asked The Count to count them, he refused! 

[…]

Instead, the defensive mob of state propagandists surrounded our tower, blocking people from seeing public broadcasting’s propaganda displayed in their own words. In the same breath, they screeched about free speech, charging conservatives with censorship for objecting to taxpayer-compelled speech from a state funded media.

Of course, whining that public broadcasting isn’t a servile stenographer is not the same thing as “bias.” Murray offered no proof that her “Left-Leaning Tower of Media Bias” wasn’t just a bunch of blank reams of paper stacked up.

Graham complained in a March 19 post that both PBS and NPR had on the author of a book highlighting right-wing efforts to sale back or overturn the New York Times. v. Sullivan ruling that forces, in Graham’s words, “a very high standard in defamation cases against public figures.” He whined that Trump was among those “cartooned as ‘truth murderers,'” but didn’t mention that Trump has, in fact, voiced support for this endeavor. Graham went on to grouse:

Just like NPR, PBS didn’t raise lawsuits against conservative-leaning news outlets, like Fox vs. Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion wasn’t “murdering the truth,” since the plaintiff was a conservative media outlet — which inside the “public” broadcasting bubble translates as “not real news media.” Democracy and press freedom = liberals.

Dominion wasn’t “murdering the truth” because Fox News had already done that by spreading lies about how Dominion purportedly manipulated presidential votes in 2020 — something Graham would know if he and his employer weren’t so invested in defending Fox News from the Dominion lawsuit and the $787 million Fox ultimately paid Dominion to settle it.

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