The Media Research Center’s complaining about criticism of President Trump’s demand that public broadcasting be defunded — a partisan goal the MRC has sought for years — continued in in a May 6 post by Clay Waters:
Both PBS and National Public Radio are cadging for change, even before President Trump’s executive order cutting taxpayer funds to PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
But NPR has gone out a bit further on the ledge since then, their tone becoming increasingly aggressive, even apocalyptic, as demonstrated by three recent donation banners that have flown on NPR’s websites and social media platforms:
[…]The problem here is that NPR has not been a friend of free speech for quite a while. When controversial figures they don’t like exercise it, NPR calls it “hate speech” and warns their listened to cover their eras as if they’re toddlers exposed to cuss words.
Waters then huffed that “As NewsBusters editor Tim Graham wrote up last year, NPR proudly refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, insisting it wasn’t a real story, but a ‘pure distraction'” — though that’s exactly what it was, as demonstrated by the MRC’s aggressive coverage of it.
The same day, Alex Christy whined that someone else defended public broadcasting:
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi gave an ode to public broadcasting on his Sunday show, where he tried to claim that the existence of public media is correlated with democratic health. In order to make such a claim, Velshi had to ignore one major detail from the study he cited.
Velshi, who is also an NPR contributor, gushed, “During the most important stories of the last half century, PBS and NPR were there. PBS broadcast the Watergate Committee’s hearings in full and brought us some of the most acclaimed documentaries of our time from Ken Burns. NPR’s voice has brought us moment-to-moment updates from the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Gulf War.”
[…]Later, Velshi welcomed former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who was compelled to resign in scandal, and wondered, “Why is there this sense that it’s either a government mouthpiece? And let’s just clear that up, because I think people associate that sort of stuff all over the world, or that it’s weirdly partisan and left-wing. Where does that come from and what was—what has your answer been to people who say that?”
Schiller tried to paint public broadcasting as centrist, “Well. Why do people attack it for being, first of all, people attack it for being too right-wing people attack it for being too left-wing. This is just part of the culture wars that we’re in right now. There is, as we know, the—as you have well reported and many others have, people have separated or divided into camps.”
As for conservative critics, “And they—only many people, unfortunately, only want to listen or read media that agrees with the point of view they already came in with. So, if you were someone that has a specific point of view that, say, everything Trump is doing is right and legal, you may not like challenges to that whether it’s coming from your show, Ali, or whether it’s coming from NPR or whether it’s coming from PBS News Hour. So this is just, unfortunately, part and parcel of the times that we live in.”
Criticism of Trump is everywhere and despite Schiller’s culture war lamentations and praise for him, Velshi himself is an active progressive culture warrior. The people truly opposed to breaking out of their intellectual bubbles would be the people Schiller referred to who think PBS and NPR are right-wing. Their advertised right-wingers aren’t even right-wing.
Then again, Christy is paid well to never leave his right-wing media bubble, content to hurl attacks at other broadcasters for partisan reasons.
Christy complained more about PBS children’s programming the next day:
Tuesday saw the second-ever installment of MSNBC’s The Weeknight, featuring Alicia Menendez, former Kamala Harris spokeswoman Symone Sanders-Townsend, and former RNC chairman and current liberal talking points repeater Michael Steele. The trio of Joy Reid replacements did their best to continue her legacy by wondering if President Trump decided to defund PBS because he thinks Elmo is black.
After playing a 2005 clip where Sesame Street parodied Trump, an aghast Menendez claimed she has been, “trying to figure out why they are so mad at Molly of Denali and Arthur and those wombats were just trying to work it out.”
Answering her own question, she continued, “And this quote from the Department of Education made it very clear. This is a spokesperson for the department who said that the Ready to Learn grants were funding ‘racial justice educational programing,’ and ‘the Trump Department of Education will prioritize funding that supports meaningful learning and improving student outcomes.’ Here’s the part I want to talk about, ‘not divisive ideologies and woke propaganda.’”
A normal news program would then highlight how Sesame Street has been trying to teach children that their skin color is “an important part” of who they are or that it, a children’s show defended by public media defenders as a show that simply teaches children the alphabet, celebrates Pride Month.
However, The Weeknight is not a normal news program, and Michael Steele is not a normal Republican.
Apparently, “normal Republicans” like Christy are the ones who continually obsess over people who aren’t avowedly heterosexual.
Waters huffed some more in a May 8 post:
The PBS News Hour ended Tuesday evening’s show to a discussion of the “chilling effect” of Trump’s executive actions on free speech on campus, based on the pro-Hamas agitators occupying campus quads and sometimes vandalizing campus buildings and attacking Jewish students, a segment slanted heavily toward the pro-Palestinian side.
No surprise there, given that a June 2024 Media Research Center study found the News Hour’s coverage to slant overwhelmingly toward the side of the protesters, downplaying their pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish rhetoric and of course, rediscovering the merits of “free speech” on campus after years of ignoring the squelching of conservative opinion on campus.
Gee, we thought the MRC cared about free speech — though that right that seems to apply only to right-wingers. Waters offered no evidence that every single pro-Palestianian protester was “pro-Hamas,” or even if they were, why that view point must be suppressed.
It was Christy’s turn to complain in a May 10 post:
Not even the death of a former Supreme Court justice can stop PBS News Hour from freaking out about President Donald Trump setting up some sort of dictatorship. On Friday, former Trump impeachment witness and David Souter law clerk Noah Feldman joined the show to remember his former boss and while he never explicitly mentioned Trump, it was clear who he was referring to when he declared of Souter’s legacy, “in the current moment, when the threat to the rule of law is unprecedented, we need that model.”
[…]After the clip, Feldman added, “Justice Souter’s whole career was devoted to being an example of the rule of law and a justice of the Supreme Court who was completely uninterested in partisanship or political ideology, but was just committed to the idea of getting the law right. And in the current moment, when the threat to the rule of law is unprecedented, we need that model.”
Christy didn’t explain what was so bad about that explanation beyond the supposed anti-Trump implications for the MRC’s right-wing agenda.
Waterss returned to grumble in a May 13 post that PBS did an interview with student protester Mohsen Mahdawi, whom Waters claimed was “held up as heroic a figure who led Jew-harassing groups on campus.” Waters followed up with a May 15 post grousing that a “common sense” COVID-related proposal was allegedly ignored on NPR until now:
Well, here’s a surprise: NPR’s “On Point” podcast, hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti and transmitting out of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, featured, on its May 5 show, an interview with author David Zweig highly critical of the hysterical and harmful reaction by the liberal “public health” establishment to the COVID pandemic.
What’s more, around the 26-minute mark, Chakrabarti herself revealed that an NPR higher-up cut off her pitch to do a story on 2020’s Great Barrington Declaration. That brief manifesto became a target of anti-science liberal hysterics for arguing against lockdown and social distancing as “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” An unidentified colleague told Chakrabarti, “We cannot talk about it” for fear of spreading misinformation.
The Great Barrington Declaration was coauthored by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University (now head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump, replacing Dr. Francis Collins, who sought to undermine Bhattacharya as “fringe”). Bhattacharya was notoriously targeted for censorship by Collins and the Biden Administration for his efforts to tamp down COVID fear and hysteria — a crusade that, according to Chakrabarti, NPR joined as well:
As we documented, the Great Barrington Declaration stated that COVID should be allowed to spread to develop “herd immunity” — a dangerous proposition at a time when the virus was still killing many people daily, vaccines had not yet been developed, and it was unclear that herd immunity would even work (and it doesn’t, given the need for regular vaccinations). That would seem to qualify as a “fringe” view.