As part of the Media Research Center’s continuing war on public broadcasting, Curtis Houck devoted a March 25 post to cheering that President Trump endorsed the right-wing agenda item of defunding it:
On Tuesday during a White House press pool Q&A ahead of a meeting with prospective U.S. Ambassadors, President Donald Trump gave his support to the House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee as it prepares to hold a hearing Wednesday with the heads of taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS, adding “I’d be honored” if he were the president to finally defund the far-left media outlets.
Real America’s Voice White House correspondent Brian Glenn asked the question, first acknowledging “[t]he subcommittee on DOGE is going to review funding for NPR and PBS” and acknowledged it’s been a frequent Republican policy promise.
“[I]f they’re successful — I know Senator [John] Kennedy has backed it, Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress has backed it, would you be interested in defunding and taking away taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS,” he wondered.
Trump didn’t hesitate in declaring he “would love to do that” as continuing to fund these “very biased” outlets has been “very unfair.”
Houck offered no evidence to back up his assertion that PBS and NPR are “far-left,” and he didn’t disclose that Real America’s Voice is a right-wing outlet. This was the lead-up, though, to a March 26 DOGE hearing designed to attack the outlets. Clay Waters huffed in a post previewing the hearing:
Before Wednesday’s congressional testimony from the heads of PBS and NPR in front of the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE), PBS’s flagship news show News Hour offered up some gaslighting on Tuesday evening in defense of the program’s political objectivity and balance — a laughable proposition to anyone who has watched an episode.
[…]After a montage of House members Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) accusing PBS and NPR of liberal bias, Brangham purported to take viewers on a deep dive into the history of public media, with two professors as subject experts: Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania and Allison Perlman of the University of California, Irvine.
Brangham emphasized popular PBS children’s programming as well as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, which grew out of the Watergate hearings in Congress and would evolve into today’s more partisan PBS News Hour.
[…]The gaslighting got really hot when PBS tried not only to pass off liberal MSNBC host and Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart as a “progressive,” but to term Trump-hating David Brooks a “conservative,” as if their regular appearances on the News Hour provide a rough balance of political opinions (in fact, they agree with each other most of the time): “And the show’s regular exchanges between Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks — one progressive and one conservative — are proving popular online….”
Waters did not explain why Capehart should be considered a “liberal” instead of a “progressive,” a odd distinction given that this employer typically makes no such distinction when labeling non-right-wingers. He also didn’t explain why not being a Trump fanboy like he is disqualifies Brooks from being a “conservative.”
After the hearing, Houck served up a highly biased review of its purported “top moments”:
On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) held a hearing featuring the CEOs of National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS amid a new push to achieve a decades-old effort to defund the far-left propaganda outlets that annually see hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.
With their federal dollars on the line, NPR’s Katherine Maher and PBS’s Paula Kerger refused to admit to the error of their ways, cartoonishly insisting their outlets deliver “essential,” “fact-based,” “non-partisan,” “trusted,” and “unbiased” reporting.
Committee Democrats rallied to their defense with Chicken Little claims about the lives of rural Americans somehow having no access to vital information, no local news, and a GOP that’s out to engage in “bullshit…to shutdown everybody that is not Fox News.”
The rest of Houck’s post is laden with selectively edited clips he first posted on Twitter/X that were largely of Republican members of Congress bashing PBS and NPR. Some of his gushing introductions (which were heavy on referencing previous MRC attacks) included:
- Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) led off with an opening statement many of these themes, starting with the archaic view of the news landscape:
- Our friends from the Heritage Foundation had Mike Gonzalez also on hand to testify, which he credited the work of our own Tim Graham:
- House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) picked up on Greene’s two points about NPR being far less valuable than it used to be and that its alleged journalism is disinformation to the point it meddles in elections:
- [Rep. Jim] Jordan also methodically exposed the racket that is the wider agency, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB):
- [Rep. Pat] Fallon then cited two NewsBusters studies from our Clay Waters on the rancorous bias at PBS on labeling “far-left” vs. “far-right” and then last year comparing the two party conventions:
Houck even worked a shout-out to his mancrush: “Congressman Brendan Gill’s (R-TX) five minutes were nothing short of a masterclass in asking questions, taking the same approach Fox’s Peter Doocy has perfected in the White House Briefing Room.” By contrast, Houck was dismissive and hostile toward public broadcasting officials who testified, and he repeatedly bashed statements from Democratic members of Congress as false without bothering to fact-check any of the attacks issued by the Republicans. He didn’t mention, however, that before the hearing, Greene bizarrely accused NPR and PBS of of “brainwashing children” and making them transgender.
Tim Graham rehashed much of this in his March 26 podcast:
In a House DOGE subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, Republicans pressed the bosses of PBS and NPR on the blatant leftist bias of their news shows, and both leaders claimed these networks are unbiased and nonpartisan. No one believes this.
PBS leader Paula Kerger and NPR leader Katherine Maher were supposedly preparing for this, reported The New York Times: “Ms. Kerger said she was preparing for the hearing by reviewing her testimony with legal counsel. Ms. Maher told staff members last month that she was preparing with so-called murder boards, rigorous question-and-answer sessions that aim to expose potential weaknesses.”
These ladies were terrible about specifics. They offered no evidence that they were acquainted with any of the examples of bias they were given by the Republicans. Maher told Rep. Jim Jordan: “I hav Then again, Graham whined the previous month that e never seen any political bias.”
When Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) cited our NewsBusters study finding PBS used “far right” or its variants 162 times to just six for “far left” terms, Kerger replied, “I don’t know the study that you’re referring to, and I’d love — I’d be very interested in seeing it and understanding how they came up with those numbers.” Should we believe she never reads studies by conservative critics of her network? It’s possible, since they demonstrate they don’t really think liberal bias is a problem. (It’s more of a privilege.) Or that could be the answer the lawyers told her to use.
The Democrats were ridiculous. Many of them just made effusive remarks about the children’s programming on PBS, or joked about how the conservatives are suspicious of the pinkish tilt of the puppets.
Graham offered no reason why those “conservative critics” of public broadcasting should be implicitly trusted for fair and balanced analysis, given that their ultimate goal is to destroy PBS and NPR. Indeed, Graham whined the previous month that “NPR doesn’t take conservative criticism seriously.”
Amid further rehashing in a March 27 post, Graham gushed that “PBS actually aired a Republican citing us,” then complained that an NPR reporter he hates pointed out the hearing’s right-wing tilt:
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik always arrives with the disclaimer that no NPR executive has reviewed his copy, but it still sounds like tinny self-defense. Online, he huffed:
The hearing, entitled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” appears arranged more to score points than to find facts.
He’s not looking in the mirror to see if this applies to NPR “news.” Worse, he claimed the hearing represented the “anti-press posture” of Republicans. Folkenflik routinely writes negative stories about Fox News — is that an “anti-press posture”? Liberals think only the liberal media is real journalism, even when their news is fake.
On All Things Considered, Folkenflik didn’t really feature the bosses responding to aggressive Republican questions about bias — denying it exists. There was 20 seconds of Rep. William Timmons pressing on former NPR editor Uri Berliner’s research on the party registrations in D.C. of NPR journalists — 87 registered Democrats, zero Republicans. But Folkenflik said NPR has “many hundreds of journalists,” so those numbers NPR “doesn’t necessarily affirm.” See? Doesn’t that sound like it was whitewashed by executives?
The same day, Bill D’Agostino put together a four-minute clip of cherry-picked PBS clips over the past 30 years, claiming that this somehow makes “a strong case for defunding PBS.” He went on to rant: “All of this rabid left-wing activism begs the world’s most obvious question: Why the hell are we funding this?” But he didn’t disclose that PBS puts out many hours of programming every day — making for thousands of hours a year and tens of thousands of hours over 30 years — and that his highly selective four-minute clip cannot possibly be representative of all PBS programming.