If PBS felt any concern about the hit its reputation for balance took at Wednesday’s devastating DOGE hearing on Capitol Hill, Thursday’s PBS News Hour didn’t show it.
On the day after its CEO Paula Kerger testified to Congress that they were fair and balanced, PBS turned to the leftist group Media Matters for America. The News Hour has never invited the Media Research Center for an interview about the state of the media since the MRC was founded in 1987.
How leftist is PBS? In the face of overwhelming evidence of its leftist political agenda, PBS shamelessly turned to another discredited leftist organization as it claims to be unbiased.
After Donald Trump won a second turn, this show created a series titled "On Democracy," as if Trump's election wasn't very democratic. This latest episode suggested the Heritage Foundation's manual of recommendations Project 2025 was a threat to democracy.
Why? Heritage scholar Mike Gonzalez, who testified in the DOGE hearing, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on why PBS and NPR should be defunded. PBS associates itself with democracy.
This segment began:
GEOFF BENNETT: Time now for our series "On Democracy," where we hear a range of perspectives on how government should function what led to this moment in American history, and where the country goes next. Our primary focus tonight is Project 2025, the conservative policy project authored by former Trump administration officials, which became a flash point [for Democrats] during the presidential campaign. Angelo Carusone has studied that 900-page document. He's president of Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit focused on researching and analyzing news media, including disinformation and online ecosystems….
Bennett toadied to his left-wing guest even more so than usual.
You have emerged as an expert on Project 2025, this road map that then-candidate Trump during the campaign repeatedly disavowed. Now the architect of Project 2025 was just quoted as saying the way that Trump has implemented it has exceeded his wildest dreams. When you look at the way President Trump has expanded his executive authority, he's dismantled federal agencies, he's purged the federal work force, how much is Project 2025 guiding this work?
After prodding Carusone with “How should those opposed to what he's doing, how should they fight back?” Bennett repeated the assumption from the latest Media Matters study -- of the political tilt of the top podcasts -- that pro-Trump voices have a huge advantage in the current media ecosystem.
BENNETT: And the right and Trump-friendly voices have an advantage here, because the other part of your work is looking at their saturation in the media ecosystem. Tell me about that.
Is this talk of the "media ecosystem" at large a convenient way to change the subject from the undeniable liberal bias of network news, cable news, and public broadcasting specifically, especially after the DOGE hearing?
Carusone claimed, "When you add it all up, the right and right-leaning and right adjacent programming accounts for 82 percent of the major online shows. That's podcasts. That's streaming channels. That's narrative dominance." Bennett nodded along to the figures, and just facilitated like he was hosting an infomercial: "And that includes podcasts that aren't overtly political like sports and comedy podcasts, for instance."
After Carusone's claim that "72 percent of explicitly non-political programming contained not only political content, but right-leaning political content," Bennett replied: "It's quite an asymmetry. I mean, is there any way that Democrats could account for that in a way that is authentic?"
Later on, Bennett saw the supposed right-dominated media (a notion that conveniently pretends MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and the three major news networks don’t exist) as a threat to democracy.
BENNETT: And that speaks to the broader implications about what it means for our democracy.
CARUSONE: That's right. And so unless there's a real concerted effort around that asymmetry, the problem is not only going to not get better. It's only going to get worse, because let's keep in mind that when we talk about all the tech oligarchs and the tech giants rolling back their policies, cozying up to Trump, it's not just that the leaders are doing that. It actually affects the rules of their algorithms, what their systems are doing. That imbalance is only going to speed up because the very systems that support them are actually privileging right-wing lies and right-wing misinformation.
PBS conveniently skipped over the past speech-silencing effect of those "tech oligarchs" and their policies, which are being rolled back under Trump: Under pressure from both the Biden administration and its own leftist employees, social media platforms spent years squelching conservative speech online, from COVID rules to BLM to transgender issues.
Oddly, while Bennett brought up “disinformation” at the start, and Carusone wound up by mentioning “right-wing misinformation,” the actual Media Matters study mentions neither word.
This segment was brought to you in part by Raymond James.
A transcript is available, click “Expand.”
PBS News Hour
3/27/25
7:38:33 p.m. (ET)
Geoff Bennett: Time now for our series On Democracy, where we hear a range of perspectives on how government should function, what led to this moment in American history, and where the country goes next. Our primary focus tonight is Project 2025, the conservative policy project authored by former Trump administration officials, which became a flash point during the presidential campaign. Angelo Carusone has studied that 900-page document. He's president of Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit focused on researching and analyzing news media, including disinformation and online ecosystems. I spoke with him days ago. Angelo Carusone, welcome to the "News Hour."
Angelo Carusone, President, Media Matters for America: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Bennett: You have emerged as an expert on Project 2025, this road map that then-candidate Trump during the campaign repeatedly disavowed. Now the architect of Project 2025 was just quoted as saying the way that Trump has implemented it has exceeded his wildest dreams. When you look at the way President Trump has expanded his executive authority, he's dismantled federal agencies, he's purged the federal work force, how much is Project 2025 guiding this work?
Angelo Carusone: What Project 2025 provided was sort of the core story here, which was to — who's the bad guy? And that was the deep state. And they basically said, essentially, most of the federal government, most of the federal workers were part of this deep state, a conspiracy to sort of prevent Donald Trump or anybody else from implementing major changes and then — and sort of a conservative agenda. And then the second thing it did was not only provide who the bad guy was, but then who's the good guy. And, in this case, the good guy is not just Donald Trump. It's a unitary executive. So that is it. Obviously, there's a lot of policy that Project 2025 has sort of provided the framework for, but essentially it was a story. And it was a story of who's the bad guy and who's the good guy? And, to that extent, that story is playing out exactly according to plan. The only major difference is the timeline. It's just moving along a lot faster. We're basically in sort of like the fifth or sixth month of Project 2025, according to the book, even though we're only in the second month of the administration.
Geoff Bennett: So where does this head next then?
Angelo Carusone: Well, one is that we're barely through — even through the layoffs and the terminations. We have only gotten rid of about 70-or-so-thousand federal workers. Project 2025 calls for somewhere around 300,000 to about a million federal workers to be removed. So where does it go? More layoffs, more terminations. The second thing, and this is the big one, is to sort of set up a collision between the executive branch and the judicial branch. One of the big parts of Project 2025 was to make it very clear that the president and the executive has ultimate authority. And that means that you start with Congress. And Congress has largely abdicated itself to the administration. So that was sort of their first target, but politics basically said, we're not even going to try to fight this out. We're not even going to defend our sort of co-equal status. So now where it goes next is sort of a showdown with the federal — with the courts.
Geoff Bennett: If the strategy is all laid out and President Trump, you can argue about what he's done. You can't argue that he hasn't been entirely transparent about it.
Angelo Carusone: Yes.
Geoff Bennett: How should those opposed to what he's doing, how should they fight back?
Angelo Carusone: I think the thing that's really important here is that we are not fighting a standard political battle. Project 2025 is really unpopular. Nobody actually really likes the policies there except a very small extreme few, but they don't see how those policies are actually affecting them. There has to be a bigger story here. And that starts with connecting the dots to the administration's actions and the harms that people are experiencing. That's a political issue, but that is that's as much of a media issue as well. And then, broadly, not this, consensus around not this. And if we are not able to win the hearts and minds, Project 2025, whatever it becomes called, will be the new norm.
Geoff Bennett: And the right and Trump-friendly voices have an advantage here, because the other part of your work is looking at their saturation in the media ecosystem. Tell me about that.
Angelo Carusone: I think the biggest challenge right now that we're grappling with, and there are lots, but they all sort of play out in one arena, and that is an information landscape. And the real battle from my perspective is in the information war. And the right just has an enormous advantage there. They have had some advantages along the way. There's always been a little bit of an imbalance. Talk radio and FOX News in the '90s and early 2000s, they had dominance. They had a lot of listeners, but there were other things that counterbalanced them. So they weren't dominant in the entire information landscape. They just spoke to a very consolidated few. That's just not the case anymore. So we just did this really big study that looked on online voices and sort of the largest programs, sort of political and non-political, adjacent left, left adjacent, right, right adjacent. When you add it all up, the right and right-leaning and right adjacent programming accounts for 82 percent of the major online shows. That's podcasts. That's streaming channels. That's just — that's narrative dominance. That — yes.
Geoff Bennett: And that includes podcasts that aren't overtly political like sports and comedy podcasts, for instance.
Angelo Carusone: Yes, that was the part that was the most to me surprising and yet disturbing about the study, is that of the 400-plus shows that we looked at, 100 or so of them were non-political, sports, culture. But when you actually looked at an analysis of the program, you listened to them, you coded them, we found that 72 percent of them, 72 percent of explicitly non-political programming contained not only political content, but right-leaning political content. They just branded it or framed it as something different. And that's where this really becomes key is, is that is the lens through which people see the world. And so when all of that programming is sort of tilting the scales in favor of the right, the story that the majority of Americans are getting day-to-day is right leaning.
And I see no better illustration of that gap than if you look at in particular what's happening with young people. Young people are accelerating and moving to the right faster than any other demographic. And I don't think it's a coincidence that they just happen to consume online media more than any other demographic does. That's their primary source and yet they themselves are moving at a faster and faster clip to the right because that landscape is so heavily dominated and saturated by the right.
Geoff Bennett: It’s quite an asymmetry. I mean, is there any way that Democrats could account for that in a way that is authentic?
Angelo Carusone: I mean, that is the key issue here, right, is that they — that they're playing with a very old playbook, that when they — they think that the issue here is about messaging and message discipline, and say, well, if we all just go out there and say the same thing at the same time, that will get our message out. That model worked 20 years ago. That doesn't work now. In fact, it feeds into the opposite. They are feeding into the story that's being told about them, which is that they're puppets, that they're inauthentic, that they don't have anything original to say. So what does that mean in practice? Stop worrying about paid media. Ads are not going to be the solution here. Investing in storytellers — the people online that do this work day-to-day, they're artists in a way. They're storytellers. They're creators. They just need the resources to continue to do what they're doing. That will help balance out the scales. The second is to stop being so afraid. The right has an advantage. That asymmetry doesn't just give them the ability to project a story. It also gives their leaders comfort and confidence. If I know that I could go out there and face-plant, and I have a massive ecosystem that is going to be like sandpaper to smooth out all the edges, and not only make that face-plant look like the greatest acrobatic feat ever, but somehow turn it into a reward system for me, I have a lot more comfort. I have a lot more confidence.
Geoff Bennett: And that speaks to the broader implications about what it means for our democracy.
Angelo Carusone: That's right. And so unless there's a real concerted effort around that asymmetry, the problem is not only going to not get better. It's only going to get worse, because let's keep in mind that when we talk about all the tech oligarchs and the tech giants rolling back their policies, cozying up to Trump, it's not just that the leaders are doing that. It actually affects the rules of their algorithms, what their systems are doing. That imbalance is only going to speed up because the very systems that support them are actually privileging right-wing lies and right-wing misinformation.
Geoff Bennett: Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, thanks for being here.
Angelo Carusone: Thanks for having me.
