‘PUBLIC’ Broadcasting Watch: PBS and NPR Trashed the Trump Speech

Tim Graham, Clay Waters
March 6th, 2025 9:25 AM

Text to Speech

00:00 00:00
Font Size

PBS and NPR know that Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are looking at defunding them, but they inevitably covered Trump’s speech to Congress with their usual anti-Trump tilt.

PBS made one surprising move by inviting former Trump aide Tiffany Smiley on the live broadcast to offer an outnumbered pro-Trump opinion. But the rest was a predictable protest parade:

-- Jonathan Capehart twice used the term “festival of meanness” to describe Trump’s speech, and Lisa Desjardins also cited Capehart’s description once. Capehart: “I’m just sort of blown away by the notion that Democrats border on the line of fearmongering, when we just listened to an hour or 45 minutes of fearmongering from the president of the United States.”

-- Highly biased White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez was sour throughout, both pre-and-post-speech. Before the speech, she lamented: “The president is also expected to continue his attacks on transgender people as he moves to roll back rights for them across the states.”

She went on “fact check” patrol after Trump spoke: “He claimed that DOGE has -- quote -- "found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud." The DOGE and Elon Musk have not provided any evidence of fraud to date. And, in fact, their wall of receipts online actually has a number of math errors….many of these things that DOGE is cutting and slashing, this is money that was voted on by Congress, sometimes in bipartisan ways. And so the president and Elon Musk have repeatedly claimed that the things that they are cutting is fraud, but have provided no evidence.”

-- Both Capehart and Rep. Pramila Jayapal implied there’d be no “You Lie!” moment yelling at the president from the Democrats…then Rep. Al Green’s screaming happened. Jayapal predicted:  I think what you will see tonight is Democrats reclaiming the chamber in a very appropriate, dignified way.” After the speech, Capehart claimed Green was “acting on his convictions.”

-- In a YouTube Q&A on Wednesday, PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins used the words “very clever” and “dignified” to describe the Democrat behavior during the speech:

Rashida Tlaib, who a lot of the people watching may know, representative, she had a whiteboard where she was changing the phrases she was writing to keep up with the president's speech, and they were very clever, I got to tell you, if you look at my Twitter feed, I put out a bunch of them. But at one point when she talked about immigrants, she said -- when he was talking about immigrants -- she wrote, “what about the immigrants who worked for you?”

So there was a real attempt to try and remain dignified against a president who Democrats do not see as dignified, a president who was really lobbing in some part really petty jabs at them during this speech. They wanted to remain dignified, most of them kept with that, but a few of them, Al Green stood up and a few others wore shirts that said “Resist,” and they also were escorted out of the chamber.

-- On Wednesday's PBS NewsHour, they aired five minutes of Barron-Lopez repeating the "fact checking" -- that's not to mention posting PolitiFact's tilted takes on their website. Once again, they allowed Trump backer Tiffany Smiley to balance out New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Co-host Amna Nawaz pelted Smiley with "constitutional crisis" panic and then executive overreach: "Is there a risk the president runs in overreaching when the impact starts to hit people at home, that they will start to step away from a president that they really put into place to bring down grocery prices, essentially, right?"

There was no "fact checking" of Sen. Elissa Slotkin's Democrat response.

 

NPR Summary

Unlike PBS, NPR didn't make an attempt to bring in a Republican or pro-Trump viewpoint around the speech. They interviewed two Democrats after the speech.

-- NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro spent several days pounding away at negative findings against Trump from the stilted PBS/NPR poll. A March 3 Morning Edition story was headlined “Poll: Majorities say state of the union is not strong, and Trump is rushing change.” He also touted that as the headline item on The NPR Politics Podcast that day. Montanaro made sure to underline those poll results in NPR’s live coverage before the speech. 

-- After Senator Slotkin's Democrat response, they oozed over her wisecracks about Elon Musk's 20-year-old DOGE staffers, and Montanaro went on a gushfest about how Slotkin's so natural, and she can resonate for the Democrats: 

“She comes across very naturally…I think this is, arguably, the best of State on the Union-like response that we’ve seen since…maybe Jim Webb, since he delivered his State of the Union response to George W. Bush [in 2007]. And a part of it was just, how natural she is, number one, but the message itself, that it seemed to hit on common-sense notes. The idea, as Asma was talking about, you know, delivering on change, but not change that is rushed, not something that’s chaotic. And it comes from lived experience for her, and I think that can resonate.”

-- On Wednesday's Morning Edition, there were four segments about the Trump speech, totaling 19 minutes and 36 seconds. That included a seven-minute interview with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia). Michel Martin's questions were pretty soft, but she tried two questions about whether Kaine thought the Democrat protest tactics were effective. Kaine made the ancient Will Rogers joke about how the Democrats aren't an organized party.

The other morning segments were all interviews with NPR reporters, a pretty common tactic. Over these stories, they salted in 231 words of Trump soundbites. There was a Slotkin soundbite in the Kaine interview.

-- On Wednesday's All Things Considered, they only considered Democrats, and interviewed "centrist" Democrat Matt Bennett of the group Third Way for 5 minutes. Juana Summers noted he wasn't a fan of the Democrat protest tactics. She asked softballs like this;  I've heard you say several times that your party appears to have lost the battle for reasonableness. How does it win it back?" Then Bennett said Trump was unreasonable and cutting government with a chainsaw.

Sign the petition to help us defund PBS and NPR over at defundpbsnpr.org.

Donor Privacy Policy