NBC News went in on PragerU, depicting the conservative educational nonprofit as scary disinformers threatening to upend our nation’s noble and besieged public education system. But in order to do so, NBC News engaged in active disinformation by depicting a family of entrenched public school advocates as a regular family.
“Critics say the videos are a tool to push a political agenda”, is how anchor Lester Holt introduced the report before going to Antonia Hylton. Hylton, of course, is a known commodity when it comes to education reporting. Meaning, she’s known to take the side of entrenched public school interests against parents.
After opening with boilerplate criticism of PragerU, infinitesimally small quotes of both CEO Marissa Streit and founder Dennis Prager, and a brief chat with a teacher while displaying a deceptive edit of a Candace Owens video on the history of slavery, Hylton turns to a racially diverse family who “say that the broader cultural war playing out in schools is hurting teachers”:
ANTONIA HYLTON: A few minutes down the road, families like the Reyes, who are a mix of white, Choctaw and Mexican-American, say that the broader cultural war playing out in schools is hurting teachers.
JOEY REYES: We trust our people, right? We trust our educators- like we said, this is the community.
HYLTON: We showed them some of PragerU’s videos designed for kids.
CANDACE OWENS: 300,000 Union soldiers, overwhelmingly white, who died during the Civil War.
HYLTON: Zoey is in fifth grade.
ZOEY REYES: What I noticed was, no other culture did anything. No other culture died. No other culture tried to stop slavery. Which I know that isn’t true.
LYNDSEY REYES: That’s extremely concerning to me. Because it’s, you know, so much inaccuracy. Um. With things.
Mr. and Mrs. Reyes are depicted simply, as “father” and “mother”, as if their professional backgrounds were not germane to the story. I’m certain that Mr. Reyes did not fail to disclose that he is a current member of the Union, Oklahoma public school board and that, likewise, Mrs. Reyes disclosed her past presidency of the Union Schools Education Foundation- organizations that are equally committed to the fundamental tenets of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. A commitment that, perhaps, is evidently reflected in their child’s critique of the racial makeup of the Union Army. And as I wrote this, I imagined General William Tecumseh Sherman being told that the March to the Sea had to be compliant with DEI benchmarks.
These omissions matter because the Reyeses are more than just concerned woke parents protesting “culture war”, but a firmly entrenched part of the local public education machine with the power to impose actual culture war on the students they purport to serve.
Hylton’s willful omissions, combined with the myriad emotional (but by no means substantive) protestations against PragerU’s content, expose the “report” as little more than propaganda in service of the continued wokification of our public school system.
In so doing, a dirty cheap shot against PragerU becomes an inadvertent but powerful advertisement in their favor.
Click “Expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, December 20th, 2023:
LESTER HOLT: We’re back now with America's curriculum controversy. Tonight we’re looking at an educational video series raising concerns. It’s gaining hold in a number of states, but critics say the videos are a tool to push a political agenda. Antonia Hylton has our reporting.
MADISON: What does it mean to be feminine?
ANTONIA HYLTON: Your kids may have seen these videos online.
MADISON: Embrace the idea of being a wife or a mother.
HYLTON: Educational videos on everything from culture to history to climate.
ROGAN O’HANDLEY: Without fossil fuels, much of the world population would starve to death in a year.
HYLTON: This is PragerU, not an actual accredited university. But rather, a pro-American education nonprofit with growing school partnerships in New Hampshire, Florida and Oklahoma.
MARISSA STREIT: It’s called edutainment…
HYLTON: According to CEO Marissa Streit, their videos are an answer to an education system too focused on diversity and gender. In this Los Angeles studio, PragerU’s artists focus on American exceptionalism.
STREIT: They feel like they're serving on the front lines of saving the war of ideas in America.
HYLTON: Since the pandemic, PragerU says it has more than doubled revenue and reached nearly 10 billion views of their videos. Founder Dennis Prager has been a controversial radio show host for years.
DENNIS PRAGER: If you're spending a good part of the day teaching kids about preferred pronouns and other what we call “woke issues”, then you’re really not teaching them.
HYLTON: What I hear from teachers of every background is they are slammed from block to block. They are underpaid. They are underappreciated. And that they don't even have time to talk about pronouns, gender theory, critical race theory.
PRAGER: I don't believe that they are telling you the truth. I actually think they’re lying to you.
HYLTON: In Oklahoma, some teachers like Gabe Lilly are using PragerU in the classroom. We watched Prager’s video…
CANDACE OWENS: Here’s the first thing you need to know.
HYLTON: …“A Short History of Slavery” together.
OWENS: After centuries of human slavery, white men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.
HYLTON: She's giving credit mostly to white people right now for ending it before- before the acknowledgment of the pain that some of your students might actually know about and feel in their families, right?
LILLY: Right. And there's a lot of content that we cover that does cover that aspect, but what we almost never talk about is the reality of slavery happening, almost since the beginning of time, to the end of time.
HYLTON: A few minutes down the road, families like the Reyes, who are a mix of white, Choctaw and Mexican-American, say that the broader cultural war playing out in schools is hurting teachers.
JOEY REYES: We trust our people, right? We trust our educators- like we said, this is the community.
HYLTON: We showed them some of PragerU’s videos designed for kids.
OWENS: 300,000 Union soldiers, overwhelmingly white, who died during the Civil War. Zoey is in fifth grade.
ZOEY REYES: What I noticed was, no other culture did anything. No other culture died. No other culture tried to stop slavery. Which I know that isn’t true.
LYNDSEY REYES: That’s extremely concerning to me. Because it’s, you know, so much inaccuracy. Um. With things.
HYLTON: What would a good American education system look like to you?
PRAGER: Like it did in the 1930s, minus anything that was offensive.
HYLTON: All the bad things going on in the 1930s?
PRAGER: Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. Minus the bad things. Yes, that's correct.
HYLTON: A vision he’s now trying to bring to schools nationwide. Antonia Hylton, NBC News, Los Angeles.
