Before Wednesday’s congressional testimony from the heads of PBS and NPR in front of the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE), PBS’s flagship news show News Hour offered up some gaslighting on Tuesday evening in defense of the program’s political objectivity and balance -- a laughable proposition to anyone who has watched an episode.
Co-anchor Geoff Bennett: President Trump today voiced his support for defunding America's public broadcasters. It comes a day before the heads of PBS and NPR testify in front of the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The hearing will examine alleged bias in public media, with calls for federal funding cuts growing louder. That funding in part helps support the work of PBS News. We wanted to take a moment to explain exactly how public media is funded and more broadly how we got to this point. William Brangham is back with that.
After a montage of House members Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) accusing PBS and NPR of liberal bias, Brangham purported to take viewers on a deep dive into the history of public media, with two professors as subject experts: Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania and Allison Perlman of the University of California, Irvine.
Brangham emphasized popular PBS children’s programming as well as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, which grew out of the Watergate hearings in Congress and would evolve into today's more partisan PBS News Hour.
Allison Perlman: In the 1990s, what we see are social conservatives who have anxiety about the political direction of some public television programming joining forces with economic conservatives who think that the transformations in the media landscape that had taken place from 1967 to the present no longer required federal support....
After Brangham acknowledged that "Every Republican administration except Gerald Ford's has tried to cut public media funding," he aired a soundbite from Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), arguing "Government doesn't need to subsidize the media anymore because the world's changed" and that PBS and NPR are also not fair or balanced.
Brangham stood up for his employers, using both a ridiculous defense of PBS and NPR's objectivity and a familiar tactic that underplays federal support for the networks.
Brangham: We should note here, independent analyses have found both PBS and NPR to be among the most objective and reliable news sources in America. But back to the question of funding. For 2025, Congress appropriated $535 million to CPB. That's less than 1/100th of a percent out of the total federal budget. It costs, on average, per American, a little over $1.50 a year….
The segment ended with a graphic of selected poll findings from "A YouGov poll obtained by Axios" (full Axios report from February here) that claimed
- 82% of voters, including 72% of Trump voters, said they valued PBS for its children's programming and educational tools.
- 65% of Trump voters think the public broadcaster is either underfunded or adequately funded.
Meanwhile, a Brian Steinberg puff piece on Variety Tuesday about the promotion of News Hour co-anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz to co-managing editors gave more space to push pro-PBS propaganda. Yet neither PBS nor Variety are prepared to call liberals “liberal,” using the euphemism “progressive” instead Meanwhile, conservatives are just plain conservative.
“I don’t think enough people know that our viewership is evenly split among conservatives, independents, progressives,” says Geoff Bennett, one of the co-anchors of the long-running program that was once known as “The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.”
The gaslighting got really hot when PBS tried not only to pass off liberal MSNBC host and Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart as a “progressive,” but to term Trump-hating David Brooks a “conservative,” as if their regular appearances on the News Hour provide a rough balance of political opinions (in fact, they agree with each other most of the time): “And the show’s regular exchanges between Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks -- one progressive and one conservative -- are proving popular online….”
