The Media Research Center’s war on public broadcasting continued with a July 6 complaint from Clay Waters:
As President Trump’s big budget bill neared a crucial vote in the Senate on Monday, PBS News Hour’s most biased reporter, Laura Barron-Lopez, covered only one side of a critical part of the bill federal health care spending on Medicare and Medicaid.
The sole guest for the segment not only represented a liberal health group, KFF (previously known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), but misleadingly assured viewers that the group was “nonpartisan.” As “nonpartisan” as you can be while still publishing policy briefs titled “10 Key Data Points About the Experiences of LGBT+ Women and Their Access to Care” which use the term “cisgender” unironically.
Waters went on to whine that the KFF spokesman is “no ‘nonpartisan’ source. His new op-ed at the New York Times states ‘Democrats will be able to point out that Republicans have just voted for the biggest health care cutbacks ever.'” Waters didn’t explain what was supposedly partisan or inaccurate about that claim.
the same day, Tim Graham cheered that a right-wing attack line slipped into an NPR show:
Whenever PBS or NPR air a discussion on defunding PBS and NPR, it’s always a tremendously one-sided chat. On June 24, the NPR talk show 1A — produced out of WAMU-FM in Washington, DC — aired an hour on the topic “How the loss of public media funding could affect America’s underserved communities.” Host Jenn White proclaimed that if federal funding was stopped, Native American and African-American stations would be hardest hit.
All the guests were pro-“public media,” and almost every caller and emailer was as well. They allowed one single conservative viewpoint, for about 75 words: “Hi, this is Kendra from Florida. And, you know, I really do lament the loss of funding for public radio especially in, like you say, Native American communities. But the only people you have to blame for that are the people at places like NPR. The programming is terrible. It’s partisan. It’s hacky. It’s, you know, people have been warning you guys for a very long time that you need to be more balanced in your coverage, and you have steadfastly refused.”
Bingo.
This was immediately rebutted by another caller: “Hi, this is Erin Timbers. I’m calling from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’m a secondary education English teacher at a local high school. And I frequently use NPR stories and podcasts in my classroom to provide students with one bangle of a story, one bangle of a position, and I often use NPR as an example of unbiased news.”
This is how liberal indoctrination works. The schools are playing PBS and NPR bias in their classrooms and telling kids it’s unbiased.
Graham and his employer are showing how right-wing indoctrination works by pushing biased and partisan “media research” and not permitting anyone to respond to it
Tim Graham spent a July 7 post bashing PBS documentarian Ken Burns:
PBS partisans treat Ken Burns as if he was one of America’s finest treasures. In reality, he should be nobody’s idea of a nonpartisan historical filmmaker. He’s a fervent liberal Democrat. When Donald Trump first won in 2016, Burns admitted “I too needed some time in the fetal position, covers pulled up to my chin.” He represents the liberal bubble at PBS.
In 2024, according to Open Secrets, he donated $18,400 to the Democratic National Committee, $10,000 to the Democratic Party of Montana, and the maximum federal donation of $3,300 to Kamala Harris, Sen Jon Tester (D-Montana), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and the congressional campaign of CNN analyst John Avlon in New York. In 2020, he donated $2,800 to socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.
Graham ranted further that Burns cited “Firing Line” as an example of a PBS show that doesn’t follow the so-called liberal bias right-wingers have accused PBS of pushing:
This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn’t have any balance.
It’s especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is “moderated by a conservative” when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.
But that’s not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to “CBS fact-checking in real time”?
Graham also whined: ‘PBS doesn’t represent everybody. It was created by liberal Democrats in 1967 to serve liberal Democrats with taxpayer money. To compare state-funded broadcasting to the Declaration of Independence is the worst kind of ideological flatulence.”
Waters returned in a July 8 post to whine that it was pointed out that one Supreme Court justice is not as right-wing as she used to be:
The Independence Day edition of the PBS News Hour, guest-anchored by John Yang, featured two liberal Supreme Court experts sympathetically discussing Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee whose votes have trended leftward of late, pleasing liberals and disappointing conservatives.
Besides using left-wing lingo on transgender issues, the panelists also discussed conservative death threats against Barrett without mentioning the left-wing assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Waters cited no evidence that anyone on the “left” endorse that assassination attempt (which was not an actual attempt — the would-be assailant turned himself in before actually attempting anything). He went on to huff that “As usual, conservatives are blamed for instigating a ‘culture war’ started by the left, in this case transgender issues and the misnomer of “gender-affirming care” (i.e. genital mutilation surgery) for teenagers.” He didn’t explain how right-wing desires to eradicate transgender people from society is not a “culture war” emanating from his side.