The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham spent his June 13 column whining that NPR is just too mean to conservatives like him:
So the House Republicans voted to end taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR. NPR CEO Katherine Maher has repeatedly claimed, in the face of avalanches of evidence, that she has never witnessed any bias at NPR. That’s beyond ridiculous. You can find it, day after day, hour on the hour. This week’s Los Angeles rioting provided plenty of exhibits.
On the June 11 Morning Edition, Los Angeles-based co-host A Martinez told listeners “We want to get a sense of how the community around Los Angeles is feeling about the decision to mobilize the military against civilians.” Notice how there’s no mention here of responding to violence or unrest by “civilians.”
The NPR host turned to Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano and these two Latino journalists engaged in a riotous defense of the protests against immigration enforcement. Arellano began by claiming “people feel like Trump doesn’t see them as Americans, that he sees us as prisoners, basically.”
Graham didn’t disprove any of that beyond huffing that “The cartooning here is gaudy and demented.” Like Graham’s well-paid depiction of NPR and PBS as far-left isn’t cartoonish? He huffed further:
The only feint toward a non-liberal point was asking about the violence. Arellano claimed: “At the protests that I’ve been to with my colleagues, 99.99 percent of the people protesting are perfectly safe. But also, to just accuse Antifa or anarchists are doing it — that’s not the case at all.” It’s just “a few teenagers hurling rocks and water bottles at the police.”
If someone threw a rock at an NPR reporter or lit an NPR studio on fire, they might be less sanguine about what percentage of a city is non-violent. NPR and PBS should never be seen as America’s oasis of civility. They’re not. They fiercely hate Republicans, and they’ll defend almost anyone against them. In the face of defunding, they couldn’t stop the bashing and trashing.
Sounds like Graham wants people to throw rocks at NPR reporters or commit arson against NPR studios. He didn’t explain why the threat of defunding should have turned NPR into good, loyal Trump-bots like himself.
Justine Brooke Murray followed up her Muppet meltdown with a June 19 video complaining that PBS and other “legacy media” don’t hate transgender people as much as she does, grousing that “‘rights’” according to our leftist media, mean the ‘right’ to force everyone else into affirming their rejection of reality. They can only achieve that by stripping everyone else’s right to disagree.” Of course, the MRC’s jihad against PBS is all about punishing it for disagreeing with Murray’s preferred right-wing orthodoxy.
Graham returned for a June 20 post lashing out at a supporter of public broadcasting:
Earlier, we noted former CNN White House screamer Jim Acosta’s appearance on Tuesday at a panel at the Center for American Progress — where Democrat officials go to work between Democrat administrations — with the provocative title “Democracy on the Line: Standing Up to the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Free Speech.”
But it’s still worth isolating Acosta’s remarks on how there should be a big cash infusion into PBS and NPR, to make them “too big to fail.” The Left sees them as wonderful gemstones of Democrat messaging, as opposed to those dictator-coddlers and misinformers at Fox News and so on.
Interestingly, Graham doesn’t dispute that there are “dictator-coddlers and misinformers” at Fox News. Instead, he huffed:
It’s fascinating that when Democrats censor conservative speech, it’s for “democracy,” and when they want to double and triple the taxpayer money for “public” broadcasting (that often smears conservatives without rebuttal,” its the flowering of quality information and “free speech.”
Graham cited no example of anyone censoring “conservative speech” simply for being conservative. It’s also worth noting that the MRC doesn’t allow anyone to rebut its attacks, even though it receives government benefits in the form of a nonprofit IRS status. That complaint seems more than a little hypocritical.
Clay Waters spent a June 22 post raging at PBS, and playing whataboutism, for pointing out a Republican senator’s inflammatory tweets about the murder of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband:
On Friday’s edition of Amanpour & Co. on PBS, host Christiane Amanpour introduced journalist Hari Sreenivasan’s segment with UC-San Diego professor and self-styled extremism expert Barbara Walter. Despite a spate of recent left-wing violence — from burning Tesla and Waymo cars by anti-Musk and anti-ICE rioters, to the anti-Semitic killings and fire-bombings, the focus was almost entirely on blaming the Republican Party for the violent surge.
Amanpour claimed that “Another feature of the MAGA decade is an alarming rise in political violence,” but at least noted the attempt on Donald Trump’s own life. Sreenivasan mentioned the killing of the two Israeli Embassy workers in D.C. and the attack on the home of Jewish Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, but left out the anti-Semitic motivations.
Meanwhile, his guest Walter emphasized right-wing domestic terror, complaining that until January 6, “Nobody wanted to talk about the rise of white nationalist violence. Nobody wanted to talk about attacks on synagogues and African Americans and Latinos….”
Sreenivasan blamed Republicans for political violence both past and future, turning a couple of deleted X posts by Utah Sen. Mike Lee riffing on the horrific political murder of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, into a harbinger of future terror.
But this was no innocent “riffing” by Lee, as Waters wants you to believe. One post said of the murders, “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.” Another featured a photo of the suspect and was captioned “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” an apparent reference to Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. Other members of Congress called out Lee’s insensitive posts, and even his hometown paper deplored them; it was only after this near-universal criticism that Lee was moved to delete the posts — something Waters failed to mention.