There are even more examples of the Media Research Center lashing out at public broadcasting that we didn’t gather in our previous collections of the MRC’s hate. Nicholas Fondacaro wrote in a Feb. 6 post:
In an appearance on Thursday’s CNN Newsroom, Republican Congressman Brandon Gill (TX) ran circles around host Pamela Brown and the network’s purported fact-checkers. At one point, Gill called out how taxpayers had been wasting money by paying for “left-wing activism” at NPR and PBS, to which Brown tried to defend it as just “journalism.”
Neither Gill nor Fondacaro offered examples of the supposed “left-wing activism” on PBS and NPR. Instead, Fondacaro lazily linked to his employer’s “Five Reasons to Defund ‘Public’ Broadcasting,” which is largely built around whining that PBS and NPR did stories on people who aren’t heterosexual.
Tim Graham groused in a March 25 post:
PBS News Weekend helped their brethren at NPR promote a podcast series on Sunday in a segment headlined “How online misinformation is ‘supercharging’ conspiracy theories.” Podcaster Zach Mack made a three-part podcast on how his conservative Christian father has gone down a “rabbit hole” of conspiracy thinking, causing a deep rift in his family. One might imagine doing a podcast on Dad losing his marbles isn’t going to heal the rift.
When one of the provided examples was “Obama will be found guilty of treason,” Graham huffed in response:
Now imagine if “Trump will be found guilty of treason” was a sign of conspiracy nonsense. You don’t have to believe in these conspiracies to smell where PBS and NPR are coming from. Take more of a listen here, and you hear that “Obama will be found guilty of treason” is one of Dad’s list of ten wild predictions for 2024, none of which came true. They left that list out of the PBS segment.
[…]As you would expect from PBS or NPR, they project that only the right-wingers and the crazy Christians delve into conspiracy theories. There’s somehow none of this on the left — even anti-vaxxers on the left. No one will focus on how post-George Floyd riots that led to deaths may have started on amplified internet chats in the BLM bubbles. “Public” broadcasting welcomed those riots as a “reckoning.”
We don’t recall Graham or anyone else at the MRC denouncing right-wing anti-vaxxers — indeed, it celebrated anti-vaxxers like Aaron Rodgers and Robert Kennedy Jr.
Comedy cop Alex Christy spent an April 15 post whining that Jon Stewart defended public broadcasting, among other things: “Stewart equated not funding something with destroying it, ‘You want to destroy NPR and PBS, the Voice of America, sell the naming rights of the Washington Monument to Hims.com? Use the R-word, the P-word, the C-word, make up your own slurs? Have the United States Naval Academy remove Maya Angelou from its bookshelves, but for some reason, keep Mein Kampf, which is a real [bleep] thing that they did, we’ll be fine!'”
On April 17, Christy did similar whining at Stephen Colbert:
Colbert declared that, “Voters are about to have even more to get mad about, because we just learned that Trump is planning to cut federal funding for NPR and PBS.”
He further added, “The White House says PBS funding does not ‘Align with the Trump administration’s priorities,’ including a PBS program from 2022 about a transgender woman who comes out to members of their bowling league in Ohio. Okay, well, I get that. ‘Cause America can’t be allowed to find out that trans people bowl.”
Colbert then tried to mock what he thought was the logic behind opposing such a subsidized documentary, “Because then, other trans bowlers might bowl as well, and if the bowling alleys—allow—the pins are women, the pins clearly are women, and the balls are boys, if you use two balls—and then—and then—and then where do the fingers go? And the bowling shoe spray turns my feet into women—I don’t—what would the problem be? I don’t—”
Are Ohio bowlers, transgender or otherwise, really so vitally important that taxpayers must subsidize documentaries about them? If Colbert really wants to go down this road, one could also recall that one time PBS rolled out allegedly conservative Christians to advocate for transitioning four-year olds.
Christy didn’t explain why stories about people who aren’t heterosexual or right-wing Christians must be suppressed, or why exactly PBS must be punished for telling those stories.
Clay Waters groused in an April 30 post that “Public television marked President Trump’s first 100 days in office with a dose of fear and loathing Monday evening, courtesy of the PBS News Hour’s most liberal reporter Laura Barron-Lopez and her guest, hostile presidential historian Mark Updegrove.” Waters made no effort to dispute the accuracy of anything Barron-Lopez or Updegrove said.