Having achieved its own Christmas in May through President Trump ordering that public broadcasting be defunded, the Media Research Center moved on to whining that people complained about it. Tim Graham grumbled in a May 3 post:
On Friday’s episode of In The Arena with Kasie Hunt, they were discussing Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS alongside his questioning of federal funding for Harvard with its serious antisemitism problem. They couldn’t actually delve into the evidence of Harvard hating Jews or the incessant liberal bias of “public” broadcasting.
New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who spent 17 years at NPR (as Lourdes, not Lulu) had a not-so-surprising theory about Trump — he just hates “independence,” anything that threatens his power. They all cast liberal bias as “independence.”
This implication that Trump as an autocrat is a little bit amusing, because Lulu is not always anti-autocrat. We like to recall in her NPR days, she gushed that being kissed by one of Fidel Castro’s two brothers in Cuba was like being “getting the blessing of the Holy Trinity.” But Trump is not a man of the Left.
[…]This show displayed the current tendency in Anti-Trump World that you can’t grant that anything he says can be treated as Reality. In this case, it extended to suggesting Harvard isn’t elite. Kasie Hunt got out a ten-foot-pole, “with what many in the MAGA community view as elite institutions.”
Graham also showed a twinge of Folkenflik Derangement Syndrome:
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik echoed this weird spin: “It, as you say, certainly the president’s supporters would argue that these are elite institutions which are somehow aimed at against them, functioning against them.”
These are supposed to be smart people, but they can’t figure out that Harvard is elite and has a serious liberal and anti-Trump bias? “Um, Kasie, the president’s supporters would argue that the the Democrats are functioning against them.”
Folkenflik also suggested Trump hates accountability:
Graham didn’t disprove anything Folkenflik said. Meanwhile, Alex Christy complained:
Self-reflection was absent as the cast of characters that made up Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour attacked President Donald Trump’s executive order that cut off their taxpayer money. From putting their heads in the sand on their liberal bias, to trying to make themselves free speech martyrs, Friday’s show by itself showed by Trump’s move was the correct one.
Host Amna Nawaz asked William Brangham, “just pull back for a little bit here. How does this fit into the larger campaign by the Trump administration that they’re waging against the press?”
Christy then groused that resident PBS conservative David Brooks isn’t enough of a Trump-bot for his tastes while also giving a pass to Fox News’ right-wing bias:
After recalling how he got the job 23 years ago, Brooks became more animated:
And I would say, if you think the PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America — and I shouldn’t be defending us. I get paid by PBS. But I’m going to do it — who’s more straight down the line than we are. Is it MSNBC? Is it Fox? Is it CNN? Lisa Desjardins, like, one of the great journalists of our time? And so I will defend PBS, A, because I know how good we do in relative terms, but, B, because we travel around the country. We see the local affiliates where they’re not doing some ideological thing. They are the voice of their community.
Of course, Fox News does not receive federal money and also has local affiliates, but to answer Brooks’s question, Brooks himself is an example of PBS’s bias. Brooks is the man whom PBS rolls out every week to give the conservative perspective on the news, and while he may claim that the problem with the GOP is that it has been captured by Trumpism, this is the guy who marveled at Barack Obama’s pants and voted for him over John McCain.
Christy didn’t explain why Brooks’ brand of conservatism is so offensive to him because it’s not sufficiently pro-Trump.
The next day, Graham whined at length that a non-right-wing person was allowed to have an opinion on PBS:
One easy way to prove that PBS and NPR are like taxpayer-funded MSNBC is their promotion of radical ranter Elie Mystal of The Nation magazine. On Amanpour & Co.on Friday, Hari Sreenivasan tossed softballs at Mystal for 17 minutes over his new book Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America.
On March 24, NPR’s Fresh Air platformed his rage for 36 minutes. Tonya Mosley facilitated the rage: “So your feelings that everything before 1965 is kind of in direct opposition to what America is most proud of. Can you explain that argument a little bit more?”
On PBS (as well as CNN International), Sreenivasan began with his overall thesis that all laws passed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be considered null and void since they were passed under American “apartheid.” On PBS, they also championed his view that the concept of illegal immigration is racist.
[…]Nobody opposed to Mystal will appear to debate his radical rantings, and his PBS and NPR interviewers are like servants. That’s why these networks shouldn’t be funded by the half of America that votes Republican.
Nobody opposed to Graham’s opinions is ever allowed to share blog or TV space with him, so he’s being a little hypocritical here.
Graham served up further whining later in the day that people defended public broadcasting:
One really easy way to know that TV journalists are Democrats is how they rush to defense of PBS and NPR and use all the same arguments that Democrats have made in congressional hearings and social media. They willfully ignore the incessant bias of “public” broadcasting and deflect back to kiddie shows like Sesame Street, as if that’s anything like comparing Trump to Hitler. On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS host Margaret Brennan was as soft as a stuffed Muppet with PBS CEO Paula Kerger:
[…]I haven’t noticed “a whole host of conservative voices” on NPR lately. Brennan should have followed up on that, as someone who’s prone to pick on J.D. Vance, to “fact check in real time.” We’d all volunteer for an NPR interview, especially if it’s about the bias on NPR. But they can’t handle the truth.
Again, no opposing voice is allowed to contradict Graham, so it appears he can’t handle the truth. Instead, he went into lecture mode:
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 also has language about insuring objectivity and balance in all programming of a controversial nature, but no one at PBS or NPR has ever observed that passage. Liberals equate “independent newsroom” with “thoroughly anti-Republican newsroom,” and you can see where Republicans are like “no, that makes you a rabidly partisan newsroom.”
Removing the funding does nothing to change the shoddy and partisan journalism that these networks do. It merely stops forcing conservative and Republicans taxpayers to fund it. NPR infamously campaigned against the Hunter Biden laptop as a “diversion,” which sounds a lot like there was no division between the White House and “independent media.”
Graham is totally cool with partisan journalism — as long as it serves his preferred right-wing partisanship. He thinks Fox News is really fair and balanced and runs an independent newsroom, deliberately ignoring its rabid partisanship. And Graham and the MRC more than demonstrated that the Hunter Biden laptop was a diversion because it devoted many, many articles to flogging and obsessing over that story for partisan purposes.
Graham’s idea of “independent media” is one that reflects his right-wing bias — something he’ll never publicly admit.