The Media Research Center’s Clay Waters spent a July 15 post whining that David Gergen’s PBS colleagues had nice things to say about him upon his death:
Friday night’s PBS News Hour tribute to former presidential adviser and former News Hour “conservative voice” David Gergen, who died July 10 at the age of 83, demonstrates how mild, center-left political personas have long been the only flavor of “conservatism” that taxpayer-funded PBS can tolerate. (And if the descriptions of Gergen reminds you of another journalist playing the “conservative” role on PBS these days, read on.)
[…]Starting in 1984, Gergen, an editor-at-large at U.S. News & World Report, served as the “conservative” voice on political discussions on the News Hour, then known as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. In 1987 he and liberal Washington Post columnist Mark Shields became the show’s Friday night political commentary team, a pairing that lasted until May 1993 when Gergen left to become a White House adviser – for Democratic president Bill Clinton.
A 1993 profile by Washington Post journalist Michael Kelly claimed Gergen was an adviser to then-presidential candidate Clinton by early 1992. That was while Gergen was serving as the ostensible conservative voice on the NewsHour.
Gergen’s obituary in the Washington Post called him a PBS “stalwart” and “gentle sparring partner of the center-left commentator Mark Shields on The NewsHour in the late 1980s and early 1990s.” The “gentle sparring” is probably making it sound tougher than it was.
Unless you’re an angry, hate-filled far-right ranter, Waters seems to believe, you can’t possibly be a real conservative. He made this even more clear as he went on to complain about another conservative on PBS:
Gergen’s journalistic trajectory may remind you of the present-day’s Friday political discussions on the PBS News Hour, ostensibly involving a liberal and conservative but actually involving two Trump-haters, one (David Brooks) slightly less liberal than the other (Jonathan Capehart). Brooks himself underlined that very point in his own Gergen tribute on Friday.
[…]“Good PBS conservative” Brooks proved the point with a new article in The Atlantic magazine,“Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?”
Interestingly, Waters failed to explain why he apparently believes Trump is good. Instead, he closed by playing partisan politics: “You can contact your Senators about defunding PBS and NPR at our site DefundPBSNPR.org.” No explanation for why PBS and NPR must be censored for failing to be right-wing enough for Waters’ tastes.