The Media Research Center has always hated public broadcasting, and the arrival of the Trump administration has encouraged its partisan goal of defunding it — which meant that the MRC ramped up the attacks on PBS and National Public Radio for the sin of talking about things that don’t advance right-wing agendas. Here’s how they lashed out at PBS and NPR in December 2024 and January of this year:
PBS
- PBS’s Bennett Goes Full MSNBC on Border Separations: ‘State-Created Orphans’
- CALL DOGE: Taxpayer-Funded PBS Thinks NBC Wasn’t Hard Enough on Trump
- PBS Warns of Rising Misogyny After Trump Win Based on 24-Hour Leftist Study
- PBS Mourns Wray ‘Allowed’ Trump ‘To Shatter Yet Another Norm’
- Taxpayer-Funded PBS Mourns as AOC Is Annihilated in House Oversight Committee Vote
- PBS Anchor Geoff Bennett Quotes WashPost: Elon Has Too Much Power, It’s ‘Oligarchy’!
- PBS Openly Embraces Biden’s Controversial Clemency for Death Row Inmates
- PBS Pushes Bezos to Sell Washington Post for Offense of Pulling Kamala Endorsement
- PBS Promotes Books and Movies About Affairs To Hype Older Women ‘Claiming Their Sexuality’
- PBS: No Problem With Biden Pardon Abuse, But Trump Wrong on 14th Amendment?
- PBS News Hour Biden Boosters Warn of ‘Rising Tech Oligarchy’ at Trump Inauguration
- PBS Holds Festival of Excuse-Making for Biden’s Preemptive Pardons
- PBS Worries Trump May Impose ‘Government Line’ With Tech Supporters
- For PBS, MLK Day and Trump’s Inauguration Are a Disturbing Coincidence
- FCC Chair Brendan Carr Opens Up Probe of NPR/PBS Advertising, or ‘Underwriting’
NPR
- NPR and NY Times: ‘Disillusioned’ by Election, ‘Some Black Women Are Deciding to Rest’
- Taxpayer-Funded NPR Touts ‘Sequeerity’ Squad Protecting Trans Folks from Trumpers
- NewsBusters Podcast: Nick Kristof’s Fake Virgin Births and NPR’s Pagans
- NPR Reporters List 8 Questions They WOULD Ask Biden If He Held a Presser (or Would They?)
- NPR Slaps Black Republican With Lame ‘No Evidence’ Card On January 6 Panel (Tim Graham column)
- NPR Labeled Stuck Astronauts ‘Stranded’ For Months, Then Trump Came Along
There was also a Dec. 4 “study” by Clay Waters complaining:
Introducing an interview with left-wing author Joshua Green, PBS News Hour co-anchor Geoff Bennett made a rare media admission: “Much has been made of the far right’s strong sway over the GOP and its agenda. But what doesn’t get nearly as much attention is the far left’s influence in the Democratic Party.”
Bennett could be describing his very own News Hour, PBS’s flagship weeknight news program. The “far left” certainly doesn’t gain attention on taxpayer-funded PBS, at least not under that label. PBS was “far” more likely to use hostile ideological terminology to describe right-leaning groups, personalities, or policies.
Waters didn’t mention that his employer prefers to baselessly and pejoratively label all non-right-wing media as “leftist” while hanging the more benign label of “right-leaning” on right-wing media.
The MRC also used its attacks on public broadcasting to forward other agendas as well. Tim Graham huffed in a Jan. 19 post:
After CNN was found liable for defamation on Friday, NBC host Tom Llamas brought on NPR media reporter David Folkenflik to survey the damages on Tom Llamas Now on the NBC News Now streaming channel.
Llamas showed words from the CNN text exchanges were Young is referred to with “We’re gonna nail this mf—er” and he’s an “a—hole” and “s—bag” and “what a punchable face.” Then he said “We should mention the CNN producers and reporters did not deny these text messages, but denied that the messages implied that the story was a quote, ‘hit piece.’”
It’s like CNN claiming that taking a bat to somebody’s windshield was not, quote, “vandalism.” Llamas then worried that jurors just aren’t knowledgeable enough about professional journalists (like CNN was professional on this story?)
[…]So we don’t “understand” that professional journalists and their activist sources sound like Mafia dons bragging about nailing people (and even exterminating them). The problem here is that CNN’s malice was exposed, in black and white, and since we don’t have access to other text messages and emails, there’s no indication this is an outlier, that this isn’t the standard operating procedure.
The MRC sent hateful writer Nicholas Fondacaro to Florida earlier this year to collude with the lawyers of plaintiff Zachary Young to paint him favorably and to smear CNN. Does that sound like something a “professional journalist” does with their ?activist sources”? We also recall that Graham had little problem with Fox News deliberately lying to its readers about the 2020 election (a narrative his employer also pursued).
When PBS did advance a right-wing agenda on immigration, Waters snarked in a Jan. 26 post that “PBS delivered a comprehensive, largely balanced take on a subject that usually brings out the most emotional liberal responses from the liberal media. Who knew PBS had it in them?” But he also whined that Trump’s “poisoning the blood of our country” quote was used ” to accuse the Republican Party of ‘sometimes giving voice to false and racist conspiracy theories.'” Waters didn’t dispute the accuracy of that statement.