The Media Research Center war on public broadcasting continued in a May 21 column by Tim Graham, who kept up his whining about coverage of things on PBS that he doesn’t like:
You can always tell when a leftist media outlet doesn’t like a story angle. They’ll cry “no evidence,” and you want to ask them if they actually spent any time searching for evidence. It’s their way of suggesting the story is too disreputable to pursue, like Hunter Biden’s laptop.
On the PBS News Hour on May 19, the term was “unfounded.” Republicans are “pouncing” on the news that Joe Biden has an aggressive case of prostate cancer. PBS anchor Amna Nawaz lamented: “Donald Trump Jr. has posted online, claiming that the diagnosis here was part of a wider cover-up around Mr. Biden’s health. He’s also repeating unfounded claims that Biden clearly had dementia.”
Here’s what the president’s son tweeted: “The Dem-Media is trying to cover up the coverup over Biden’s failing health — Which was obvious to anyone with a functioning brain — Because they know it implicates all of them.”
It’s not “unfounded” to claim that the media cooperated in shaming and suppressing on Biden’s cognitive decline.
Just because right-wingers have seized on a narrative doesn’t necessarily make it “founded.” His whataboutism continued:
PBS and NPR would never air stories suggesting “Joe Biden/Kamala Harris suggested without evidence that Donald Trump is a fascist.” Or in the current moment, they didn’t report “Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made the unfounded charge that ICE agents are ‘Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.’”
Instead, when Harris agreed on Charlamagne Tha God’s radio show last October that Trump is a fascist, PBS brought on Trump-despising professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat for a story headlined “Trump ramps up his dangerous political rhetoric in final weeks of campaign.”
It’s apparently not “dangerous” to compare Trump to fascist dictators after two assassination attempts.
Graham offered no evidence that PBS or NPR inspired those assassination attempts, nor does he deny that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was quite heated. Instead, he concluded with one more whine: “The notion that Trump-supporting taxpayers have to turn over their hard-earned money for these transparently partisan ‘public media’ outlets never stops being an outrage.” Graham presumably would not be outraged if PBS and NPR were Fox News clones.
The same day, Clay Waters griped that a PBS show called out some of the Trump administration’s budget cuts:
More than any other news network, the PBS News Hour has devoted the first few months of the second Trump administration focusing on the sad stories of proposed and actual Trump administration budget reductions, finding sympathetic victims to personalize the trauma and harm done. Then it turns around and runs a story about Moody’s downgrading the U.S. credit rating due to the growing U.S. debt – somehow, both budget restraint and budget profligacy reflect badly on the Trump administration.
PBS went all out to fight Monday evening for a relatively obscure federal program, the once-controversial AmeriCorps, which places young adults in schools (e.g. the Teach for America program) and other public service roles, created to liberal media fanfare during the Clinton administration.
A 1999 commentary from the libertarian Cato Institute called AmeriCorps an “ill-designed, if well-intentioned, program” bugged by “high costs….high dropout rates (almost 30 percent), questionable training (sex education, video presentation skills, diversity)” and “wasteful spending ($400,000 to the AFL-CIO for “training and technical assistance”).”
We heard none of that from PBS. Instead, co-anchor Geoff Bennett leaned hard on local media headlines to bolster the fight for AmeriCorps, then solicited sob stories from no less than four nonprofit executives fighting to continue the federal funding.
Yes, Waters had to go back all the way to 1999 to find something negative about AmeriCorps. He didn’t explain why PBS had to report a 26-year-old attack.
In a May 22 post, Waters groused that “On Wednesday’s edition of the PBS News Hour, co-anchor Geoff Bennett twisted a legitimate arrest of a Democratic congresswoman for pushing and shoving federal agents into a Trump revenge tour against his ‘perceived political adversaries.’ As if a victim of relentless Democratic lawfare and two assassination attempts doesn’t have actual enemies? As if Biden wasn’t on a ‘revenge tour’ after January 6?” Waters offered no evidence that the arrest of the Democratic congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, was actually “legitimate,” beyond citing a fellow MRC writer to claim that “body camera footage and numerous other clips from the event showed McIver shoving, pushing, and shouting obscenities at federal agents who were trying to control the situation,” nor did he prove that holding Capitol rioters accountable for their crimes was a “revenge tour” by Biden.
Alex Christy offered a similar complaint about PBS criticizing spending cuts in a May 24 post:
The trio of PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks tried to have it both ways on Friday. The three men attacked the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill for its negative effects on the deficit, but also its spending cuts, meaning PBS either wants to raise most people’s taxes, but is too afraid to say so or they want a bill with even higher deficits.
Bennett began by asking Capehart, “Jonathan, this bill extends the Trump tax cuts, but to pay for them, it cuts Medicaid, it slashes food stamps, it rolls back the Biden clean energy agenda. What does this bill say about Republican priorities?”
If Republicans fail to pass something, nearly every American faces an income tax increase next year, but Capehart tried to insist Republicans are only seeking to help the rich, “What this budget shows is that Republicans are hell-bent on financing tax cuts for the upper income at the expense of middle-class, working-class, and poor Americans. And it’s something that Republicans — House Republicans are going to have to explain to their constituents.”
There are some Republicans who want even more spending cuts, which, if they had their way, might cause Jonathan Capehart to spontaneously combust, but he still cited them to attack the House’s bill, “If you look over on the Senate side, particularly, I saw a clip of Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, no liberal at all, railing against the deficit impacts of what the House has passed.”[…]
Republicans face some difficult choices. Raising taxes would lower the deficit but would also harm most Americans and hinder the economy. That leaves spending, which the previous administration raised to irresponsible levels, and now PBS is attacking Republicans for having to fix Democratic-created problems.
Christy failed to mention that the federal deficit in Trump’s first term increased by nearly $8 billion, making much more than a “Democratic-crated problem.”
Waters returned with his own May 24 post:
On her Next Question podcast, Katie Couric, the former anchor of NBC’s Today and CBS Evening News, mostly commiserated with PBS chief executive Paula Kerger, whose network is under fire for is undeniable liberal bias that’s caused an existential crisis under the Trump administration which is aiming to cut its taxpayer funding. Yet Kerger refused to even consider the bias argument when she was finally, gently confronted by Couric (who doesn’t believe media bias exists) almost a half-hour into the podcast.[…]
“Give me an example.” What? The Media Research Center has spent decades providing myriad examples of bias from public television (PBS) and public radio (NPR), just a click away. Kerger used the same “I haven’t seen any examples” tactic in the March 26 congressional hearing.
Your move, PBS.
Whining about non-right-wing things in public broadcasting does not necessarily equate to “liberal bias” — indeed, it more clearly demonstrates that the MRC has an axe to grind against public broadcasting for not being a Fox News clone.