Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd heaped scorn on conservatives while defending the indefensible –taxpayer-funded PBS and National Public Radio – as “fair and balanced” in Wednesday’s paper, in a long column under the long title “PBS and NPR cater to all Americans, despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene might believe.”
It's easy for Hollywood journalists to look down their nose at red-state Republicans and dismiss all the evidence of left-wing tilt they brought to the CEOs of NPR and PBS.
Every so often across my 21 years as a TV critic at this paper, I have been moved to defend public broadcasting against regular right-wing attempts to defund it. The difference now -- well, one difference -- is we are living in a time without guardrails, when the ethos at the top seems to be Do What You Want, Lie Outrageously and Trust That You'll Get Away With It, when all sorts of hard-won, long-established public goods are being crippled by executive caveat, and formerly more-or-less independent institutions scramble to paint the roses red in order to keep their heads.
Last Wednesday, PBS Chief Executive Paula Kerger, and Katherine Maher, who heads NPR, testified before Congress, essentially to bat off charges of liberal bias and to make the case that public broadcasting is a valuable social good, to politicians who don't necessarily value social goods.
Lloyd bragged about what a great deal the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which funds PBS and NPR) is for taxpayers, “an estimated $1.50 per American per year” and dutifully hailed Ken Burns, “the country's most famous documentary filmmaker.” At least he skipped Big Bird, perhaps aware that the rights to Sesame Street was until recently owned by television platform HBO, and hasn't been owned by PBS for a decade.
On the key subject of the hearing, liberal bias on the taxpayers’ dime, Lloyd was evasive.
And there is more to public broadcasting than PBS and NPR, as much as they might seem to be synonymous, and more to PBS and NPR than their news programs -- PBS, for the record, does not produce programs but only distributes programs produced by member stations -- though that is where Greene and company primarily aimed their "liberal bias" attack. (For what it's worth, I know more than a few people on the left who find NPR's news coverage exasperating.)
Clearly Lloyd clearly hangs out with ultra-leftists. Then he really got snotty.
But I doubt Greene or her like-minded colleagues have spent much, or any time, watching PBS or listening to NPR, beyond the minimum needed to fuel their outrage. The fact that the system is decentralized means that its audience is neither urban nor rural, white nor BIPOC, rich nor poor, coastal nor heartland....
Citing local-oriented shows like "Michigan Out-of-Doors” and "Wyoming Chronicle," he huffed, “To call public media radical because it makes room for ideas you might find objectionable is uninformed, delusional or mere performative partisan anti-wokeism.”
Again and again, the writer failed to engage on what actually transpired at the hearing, or the damning things especially from NPR’s Katherine Maher.
Eventually Lloyd attempted to defend PBS’s actual slanted political journalism via liberal bromides about “speaking truth to power.”
Their news programs may be imperfect, as what is not, but they deal in fact-based reality and subscribe, ideally, to the old journalistic formulation of speaking truth to power – especially valuable in a time when power asserts that truth is whatever it says it is.
He even called PBS “fair and balanced”!
I suppose if Fox News is your yardstick of “fair and balanced,” the actually fair and balanced “PBS NewsHour,” from WETA in Washington, D.C., might seem unfair and unbalanced. But accusations that public media peddle disinformation and propaganda would be more accurately aimed at the accusers and at an administration seemingly dedicated to retailing a fairy-tale American history less offensive to MAGA sensibilities.
