Following a highly biased DOGE-driven congressional hearing designed to bash public broadcasting, the Media Research Center was on a roll, especially since Republican members of Congress cited the MRC’s so-called anti-PBS and NPR “research.” Clay Waters groused in a March 27 post that “Hard-left hysteric and Yale professor Jason Stanley is fleeing to Canada and tax-funded television is on it.” He didn’t explain why Stanley’s story wasn’t worth telling, beyond it being something he doesn’t want told.
From there, it was time to whine that people were defending public broadcasting in violation of the MRC’s partisan agenda. Tim Graham rehashed the hearing yet again from his highly biased viewpoint in a March 27 column:
Down in the basement of the Capitol on March 26, I witnessed in person an episode of government accountability that upset liberal journalists. That’s because it was conservatives holding leftist “public” media networks accountable.
The House DOGE subcommittee questioned PBS CEO Paula Kerger and NPR CEO Katherine Maher about their daily deluge of leftist bias.
Graham didn’t prove that such a “deluge” actually exists. From there, it was on to whining that the New York Times didn’t sound like the right-wing New York Post in reporting on the hearing:
The media reporters lamented Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) calling the “public” radio and TV outlets “radical left-wing echo chambers,” like it was a crazy allegation. “The leaders of both PBS and NPR testified that those claims were untrue, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans.” Kerger and Maher insisting to Republicans their networks are unbiased and nonpartisan? That’s crazy.
Liberals described this hearing as “anti-press.” Attack them as biased, you’re attacking “freedom of the press.”
But turn it around: when The Times writes articles attacking Fox News, is that “anti-press”? The Times thinks they’re “democracy,” while Fox seeks to “end” democracy. They have the audacity to accuse Fox of being part of a “Praetorian Guard of Friendly Media” for Trump, like their paper didn’t paper over all of Biden’s flaws and scandals.
If the “Praetorian Guard” defense is such a bad thing — indeed, the MRC loves to toss that allegation around regarding non-right-wing outlets — why won’t Graham and the MRC treat Fox News the same way? It’s not like he’s denying the accusation. Instead, he further huffed:
The Mullin-Grynbaum story was relentless advocacy for their P.R. partners. They included absolutely none of the Republican questions loaded with examples of taxpayer-subsidized propaganda, and they never mentioned conservative witness Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation. This left the impression that the Republican “dark pronouncements” had no basis in fact. Who needs to confront evidence?
As we documented, the MRC’s take on the hearing, written by Curtis Houck, featured selectively edited videos and promotion of Republicans taking partisan shots at public broadcasting, with Houck baselessly insisting that PBS and NPR is “far-left.”
Alex Christy went into comedy-cop mode in a March 27 post:
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel was the only late night comedian to acknowledge the existence of Wednesday’s House hearing on how PBS and NPR have used taxpayer money to promote liberal causes while attacking conservatives. However, for Kimmel, the main takeaway was that subcommittee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene supposedly looks like one of the drag queens she was dismayed was aired on a PBS childhood education program.
Kimmel introduced a clip of Greene at the hearing after mocking Rep. James Comer for demanding answers on whether it was an NPR reporter that accidentally hit President Donald Trump in the face with a boom microphone, “You’d be shocked to know they did not get to the bottom of this, because the chair of the committee that called the hearing today had more important fish to fry.”
In the clip, Greene introduced a video of her own, “This show was aired on PBS on April 1, 2021.”
The clip within a clip showed a drag queen called Lil Miss Hot Mess singing a song to children to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus,” “The hips on the drag queen go swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish. The shoulder on the drag queen goes shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy.”
Green then replied, “The hips go swish, swish, swish. The shoulders go shimmy, shimmy, shimmy. That’s repulsive.”
As for Kimmel, he reacted, “Someone please make a song out of that, will you? Wait, which one was the drag queen? I’m confused.”
Christy had to concede that the clip in question aired on a single PBS affiliate, not the entire network, but he was in full spin mode: “A local PBS affiliate is still federally funded via the national company.”
Christy played comedy cop again in a post the next day:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert tried to have it both ways on Thursday’s taping of The Late Show. On one hand he mocked Republicans for wanting to defund PBS out of concerns its documentaries were sexualizing children because what child watches PBS? On the other hand, he defended PBS against calls to defund it by citing all the children’s programming it does. Later in the show, Colbert would welcome Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and press him from the left on his recent decision not to shut down the government and argue that October 7 was not the start of a dangerous uptick in anti-Semitism.
Colbert began by introducing a clip of subcommittee chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene by declaring she “kicked things off with a weird rant about grooming kids.”
In the clip, Greene proclaimed, “This is not the only example of them sexualizing and grooming children. They’ve been doing it for over the last decade. In 2015, PBS produced Frontline put out a documentary Growing up Trans.”
Missing the point, Colbert reacted, “Ma’am, I think the better question might be: Why are your kids watching Frontline? ‘All right, kiddos. One more episode of ‘South Korea’s truth commission’ but then it’s right to bed.’ ‘Awwwww, mom. But we wanted to watch ‘Amanpour and Company.’”
Christy didn’t explain why Greene obsessing about “grooming” was not weird, as if letting people know that non-heterosexual people exist will somehow destroy them for life. Instead, he irrelevantly insisted, “The actual point is that PBS is just taxpayer-subsidized MSNBC,” then whined that “Colbert then tried to defend the network by highlighting its children’s shows.”
Waters returned with a March 30 post insisting that the biased DOGE hearing was “devastating” and being mad that PBS wouldn’t acknowledge his biased opinion:
On the day after its CEO Paula Kerger testified to Congress that they were fair and balanced, PBS turned to the leftist group Media Matters for America. The News Hour has never invited the Media Research Center for an interview about the state of the media since the MRC was founded in 1987.
How leftist is PBS? In the face of overwhelming evidence of its leftist political agenda, PBS shamelessly turned to another discredited leftist organization as it claims to be unbiased.
After Donald Trump won a second turn, this show created a series titled “On Democracy,” as if Trump’s election wasn’t very democratic. This latest episode suggested the Heritage Foundation’s manual of recommendations Project 2025 was a threat to democracy.
Why? Heritage scholar Mike Gonzalez, who testified in the DOGE hearing, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on why PBS and NPR should be defunded. PBS associates itself with democracy.
Waters didn’t disclose that Gonzales and the Heritage Foundation are right-wing ideologues like himself. And his whine about MRC reps never appearing on the “News Hour” is a lead-in to the “leftist organization” representative appearing in the segment being Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. (As far as we know, no Media Matters representative has ever been allowed to appear on any Fox News program. And disclosure: We used to work for Media Matters.) Waters turned his focus toward “the latest Media Matters study — of the political tilt of the top podcasts — that pro-Trump voices have a huge advantage in the current media ecosystem”:
Is this talk of the “media ecosystem” at large a convenient way to change the subject from the undeniable liberal bias of network news, cable news, and public broadcasting specifically, especially after the DOGE hearing?
Carusone claimed, “When you add it all up, the right and right-leaning and right adjacent programming accounts for 82 percent of the major online shows. That’s podcasts. That’s streaming channels. That’s narrative dominance.” Bennett nodded along to the figures, and just facilitated like he was hosting an infomercial: “And that includes podcasts that aren’t overtly political like sports and comedy podcasts, for instance.”
Waters didn’t dispute the accuracy of the Media Matters study, only whining that it didn’t use the words “disinformation” and “right-wing misinformation” though both terms were referenced during the segment. And he never offered any evidence to back up his claim that Media Matters is “discredited.” (Unlike his own employer, which has peddled bogus election fraud conspiracies.)
Graham devoted a March 30 post to touting the MRC’s favorite fair-weather conservative spouting conservatively correct talking points:
During his online “Overtime” segment, Maher read a viewer question based on this week’s House DOGE hearing with the CEOs of NPR and PBS questioning their political tilt. The viewer asked: “Should the government continue to send taxpayer dollars to public broadcasting? “
Maher confused defunding PBS with dismantling PBS: “The Republicans have wanted to get rid of PBS for as long as I can remember. This crowd will probably do it.”
Maher suggested it’s time to defund these networks. This underlines why Maher, with his occasional libertarian hot takes, hasn’t been favored with an NPR promotional platform on the talk show Fresh Air since 2008.
Maher said: “My namesake, Katherine Maher, was head of NPR, and she said ‘we’re completely unbiased.’ Give me a break, lady! I mean, they’re crazy far-left.”
Unsurprisingly, no evidence was provided by either Graham or Maher that NPR is “crazy far-left.” And Graham didn’t explain why is was wrong for Maher or anyone else to claim that right-wingers want to “dismantle” public broadcasting, when that’s been the obvious intent all along.