As part of the Media Research Center’s war on public broadcasting, Clay Waters lashed out at a PBS reporter in a June 11 post:
PBS News Hour’s most biased reporter, White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, filed a wide-ranging story Monday about some of the more controversial figures in the orbit of Donald Trump’s administration, yet also spread the ridiculous notion that Trump himself is an anti-Semite (if so, he’s doing a very bad job of it).
Her sole guest was Jacob Ware, described by Barron-Lopez as a “research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations studying domestic terrorism and counterterrorism.” Left out: Ware is the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition – Far Right Terrorism in America, which radical professor (and PBS favorite) Cynthia Miller-Idriss praised in a blurb as “A vital addition to the global understanding of supremacist terror and….indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand what is demonstrably the most pressing threat to democracy and social cohesion.”
Not exactly a balanced perspective, then.
Even though Trump has come down hard on elite colleges for their tolerance of anti-Semitism against Jewish students on campus, Barron-Lopez saw every controversial Trump move through an anti-Semitic prism, running down an old list.
Waters didn’t explain why that “old list” didn’t prove that Trump has anti-Semitic tendencies — and he didn’t update his post when, a few weeks, later, Trump added to it when he invoked the anti-Semitic term “Shylock” to describe moneylenders. Instead, he went on to invoke the “Charlottesville lie” lie, whining that the show promoted a “mischaracterization of Trump’s words.”
From there, Waters huffed that PBS wouldn’t peddle right-wing narratives about protests in Los Angeles:
Tuesday’s PBS News Hour led off with special correspondent Marcia Biggs’ nearly nine-minute segment from downtown Los Angeles, ground zero in the confrontation between Trump’s immigration enforcement and protests that often devolved into looting and rioting.
Co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett noted that “700 Marines and 2,000 additional National Guard troops began arriving” on Tuesday, while California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump drew political swords via a lawsuit filed by Newsom and Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg.
The hosts handed things off to Biggs, embedded in downtown Los Angeles, who saw “tense calm on the streets” while admitting to some looting the night before, with the usual ridiculous caveat of “nonviolent” protests.
Waters offered no evidence to prove his argument that all protesters were violent. Then again, his former boss Brent Bozell thinks the Capitol riot was “mostly peaceful” because his son was a participant.
Waters groused further about PBS refusing to adhere to his narrative in a June 14 post:
Thursday night’s edition of the PBS News Hour turned to a leftist group the Brennan Center for Justice and a liberal mayor as their experts to criticize President Trump’s use of the National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles and other cities to quell violence at protests against ICE’s arrest of illegal immigrants. Any mention of the actual violence and rioting in Los Angeles within the two stories was limited to hypothetical talk of “civil unrest.”
Waters then groused that PBS doesn’t hate immigrants as much as he does:
Once again, the Left paints illegal immigrants as “our neighbors,” which basically implies no one should be deported, for any reason. Bennett relayed the news that Texas Governor Greg Abbott said 5,000 National Guard members had been deployed in his state ahead of planned protests and that “Several mayors are pushing back on that move, including San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg….”
Waters made no effort to show that Trump’s major show of force was justified.