The Media Research Center’s war on public broadcasting entered the nepo-baby phase in a June 5 post:
MRC President David Bozell joined WMAL’s “O’Connor & Co.” show on Wednesday morning to break down the latest developments in the push to stop the misuse of taxpayer dollars by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Bozell expressed optimism that defunding will happen.
In the first wave of a sweeping rescissions package from the Trump administration, the House GOP has included a $1.1 billion cut to CPB. It’s the clearest sign yet that conservatives are serious about ending taxpayer-funded propaganda.
“This is something that I think 90 percent of Republicans would have voted on years ago. Another nine percent probably are a little bit squishy on it, but they would get there,” Bozell said.
“And there are probably one percent of Republicans that are holdouts. We’ve got to work on those guys. But I think we’ll get there. This is something that the president has been championing during Trump 1.0 and now currently during Trump 2.0, and we’re super excited about the advancement.”
[…]Bozell is hopeful for the rescission package to continue advancing. Bozell stated, “I’m a glass-half-full guy, and I think this is going to happen.”
Alex Christy went the Stelter derangement route for a post the same day:
CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter joined The Situation Room on Wednesday morning to freak out over President Trump’s rescission package that asks Congress to revoke funding for PBS and NPR. According to Stelter, not only would such a move cause local affiliates to “suffer as well,” but he also hyped PEN America saying the real reason for the move was about “discouraging real news.”
Co-host Pamela Brown wondered about the rescission’s chance of success, “So then are there any Republicans who have signaled that they will support keeping this funding? How do we expect this to play out?”
[…]Additionally, it is frustrating to watch Stelter, who never hesitates to point out what he sees as problems with conservative media or bias at places like Fox News, just rhetorically shrug his shoulders and suggest bias at NPR and PBS is just a matter of opinion.
Why doesn’t Christy or anyone else at the MRC see bias at Fox News as a problem, while obsessing over purported bias at PBS and NPR? He refuses to explain.
Clay Waters served up his own June 5 post complaining that NPR doesn’t hate LGBT people like he does:
National Public Radio “breaking news” reporter Ayana Archie served up an example of tax-funded public media once again going beyond traditional liberal media support for gay rights and going full throttle to throw unprofessional, anti-journalistic support to the entire alphabet movement (LGBTQIA….) in an article posted to NPR Thursday, “The LGBT community shows up for WorldPride in D.C., despite some worries about Trump.”
Archie piled on the melodrama right off the bat.
After one activist referenced the idea that “the LGBTQ+ community cannot be erased,” Waters huffed: “Who is talking about ‘erasure,’ besides LGBTQ movement activists posing as victims?” Well, the Trump administration, for one, which has worked to wipe out references to LGBT people and their accomplishments in government publications.
A June 8 post by Waters trotted out a guy who deliberately blew up his career at NPR in service of a right-wing agenda (and to get Tim Graham to spew that agenda before a House committee) for more attacks:
The Thursday episode of the “Ask a Jew” podcast hosted Uri Berliner, former senior business editor at NPR, who was suspended and later resigned from the outlet for his damning critique of the insular liberal bias of taxpayer funded NPR. Hosts Yael Bar tur and Chaya Leah Sufrin asked Berliner about how NPR covered Israel, and the resulting discussion was withering.
Berliner characterized one NPR story on anti-Semitism in particular as “bullshit.”
[…]Co-host Sufrin later added an anecdote about how her Jewish friends were turning away from NPR in “mourning” over its Israel coverage, and Berliner saw NPR as alienating everyone but its “hard left” audience.
Waters offered no evidence to bolster the co-host’s contention that NPR’s audience is “hard left.”
Intern Lucas Escala was on bashing duty for a June 10 post:
Few words are as frequently misused to garner attention as the phrase “unprecedented.” Contrary to the way liberal media likes to throw the word around, everything you disagree with is not considered unprecedented. There is, of course, quite a bit of precedent for news stations like PBS using their platform to complain about “unprecedented” Republican politics.
During PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the Los Angeles riots Monday, host Geoff Bennett emphasized the unprecedented nature of both President Trump’s disregard of Governor Newsom’s rejection of National Guard support and his deployment of Marines to the city to keep the peace. Naturally, there was actually precedent for both these actions.
[…]As unprecedented as Kayyem might like to consider the situation, most other news stations at least acknowledged President Lyndon B. Johnson’s similar superseding of a governor’s wishes to federalize the National Guard in 1965. In that situation, Johnson sent the National Guard to Alabama to protect civil rights activists whom Democrat Governor George Wallace refused to support.
[…]This, too, was something we had seen before now. During the Rodney King riots of 1992, President George H. W. Bush sent in over 3000 members of the Army and Marine Corps to reinforce the National Guard. In fact, it was not all that uncommon for the military to be deployed to cities during periods of civil unrest.
No matter how PBS tried to spin it, President Trump’s actions were not lawless, they were not expected to become the norm, and they were far from unprecedented.
Escala offered no evidence that the alleged level of “civil unrest” in Los Angeles warranted federalizing the National Guard and possibly breaking the Posse Comitatus Act to deploy the military against Americans.