People seem to assume that because PBS is dry and somewhat boring, that must also mean it’s also more serious than other news channels. But the truth is, the commentary on shows like NewsHour is as far in crazy left-wing territory as most prime time MSNBC shows, and it’s been this way since at least the 1990s.
Back in 2017 when MSNBC’s Joy Reid implied that then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) was to blame for his own attempted assassination, conservatives were disgusted, of course, but we weren’t exactly surprised. That’s just MSNBC, we thought. There’s something significantly more alarming about — for example — the 1994 incident in which columnist Julianne Malveaux said on PBS’s To the Contrary: “I hope [Clarence Thomas’s] wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like so many black men do, of heart disease.”
Of course, the difference is that PBS is publicly funded. That commentary by Malveaux was paid for by tax dollars extracted from conservatives all across the country, and even from Clarence and Ginni Thomas themselves.
Granted, 1994 was a long time ago. So let’s look at some more recent cases of venomous, taxpayer-funded political commentary.
- 2003: Longtime PBS documentarian Bill Moyers compared the American flag lapel pins sported by congressional Republicans to Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book”:
When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.
- 2010: PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley explicitly equated radical Islamic terrorism to the everyday behavior of Christians in America:
AYAAN HIRSI ALI: The idea got into [radical Islamists’] minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do, and that they will be rewarded in the hereafter.
TAVIS SMILEY: But Christians do that every single day in this country.
ALI: Do they blow people up?
SMILEY: Yes — Christians? Every day.
- 2017: Notoriously boring PBS host Charlie Rose had this exchange on his talk show with author Kurt Andersen:
KURT ANDERSEN: America is exception religious, has always been exceptionally religious, compared to the rest of —
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, it was founded by people who were seeking religious freedom.
ANDERSEN: Well, that’s one, that’s the charitable way of putting it. Founded also by a theocratic cult of religious nuts.
ROSE: Okay. Right, right.
- 2020: British-Iranian PBS host Christiane Amanpour likened the first Trump administration’s “modern-day assault” on “fact, knowledge, history, and truth,” to Kristallnacht and the Nazi regime’s book burnings. She went on to laud the then-incoming Biden administration as a “return to norms, including the truth.”
- 2021: PBS contributor Jonathan Capehart accused the Republican Party of “picking at white grievance and tap-dancing with white supremacy,” as a means of getting “back into power.”
- 2023: David Rubenstein, in his PBS documentary about the Tea Party, asked Democratic Representative James Clyburn: “In 2010, there was a Tea Party rally eat the Capitol. Did you have a sense, from listening to that rally and the people there, that they were as much interested in being anti-black as they were anti-ObamaCare?”
- 2024: During PBS’s live coverage of the second night of the Republican National Convention, host Amna Nawaz remarked: “We have seen though, I should note, Republican rhetoric veer into outright racism, echoing some white supremacist notions as well.”
All of this rabid left-wing activism begs the world’s most obvious question: Why the hell are we funding this?
Those quotes above represent a mere drop in the very large, boring, pseudo-Marxist bucket that is PBS. The sheer volume of liberal insanity that is broadcast by PBS boggles the mind. Just take a look at Clay Waters’s author page on NewsBusters and you'll find more than you could ever want.
Private-sector networks like MSNBC already can (and do) liken Trump to Hitler and accuse Republicans of white supremacy to their heart’s content. (As always, we’ll be there to cover it when they do.) But if PBS wants to engage in that same beltway brand of disgusting, misleading, and useless political coverage, they can do it on their own dime.
