Public Broadcasting

The headline deck to the June 16 piece by Jesús Rodríguez for the Washington Post, a profile of the first transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court, heralded the gush to come: “Chase Strangio is trying to help trans people exist in Trump’s America”!

In Friday’s online NPR piece “The story behind the arrest of 87-year-old veteran John Spitzberg at the Capitol,” Alina Hartounian, who edits and writes for NPR.org, made a hero of an elderly activist protesting the recent U.S. military parade, who got arrested. NPR played the feisty old man angle hard to an embarrassing extent. The report began in medias res, the reporter striving to…

In May, President Trump fired Carla Hayden, the Obama-nominated head of the Library of Congress, and the PBS News Hour came to the defense of its tax-funded brethren on Friday evening. Setting up a previously recorded interview with Hayden, co-anchor Geoff Bennett called Hayden “a trailblazing Librarian of Congress” and said, “I traveled to Baltimore to speak with her about being…

On Friday’s edition of Amanpour & Co. on PBS, host Christiane Amanpour introduced journalist Hari Sreenivasan’s segment with UC-San Diego professor and self-styled extremism expert Barbara Walter. Despite support for left-wing violence from burning Tesla and Waymo cars by anti-Musk and anti-ICE rioters, despite the anti-Semitic killings and fire-bombings, the focus was almost…

If one were only to watch Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour, they would come away with the impression that “rotten” political rhetoric is mainly a right-wing phenomenon. Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart went so far as to claim Republicans are afraid “of being human” on the matter.

Earlier, we noted former CNN White House screamer Jim Acosta's appearance on Tuesday at a panel at the Center for American Progress. But it's still worth isolating Acosta's remarks on how there should be a big cash infusion into PBS and NPR, to make them "too big to fail."

PBS’s Christiane Amanpour sat down with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi on Tuesday to get his perspective on the ongoing war between Israel and Iran, but Amanpour’s usual mantra of being “truthful, not neutral” mostly took a back seat as she never challenged him on the regime’s anti-Semitic, eliminationist rhetoric or his rewriting of Iran-Iraq War history.

Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart claimed on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour that he knows the actual reason for President Trump’s response to rioting in Los Angeles and for Saturday’s Army parade in Washington. According to him, it is all part of a scheme that will eventually allow Trump to cancel elections.

Thursday night’s edition of the PBS News Hour turned to leftist group the Brennan Center for Justice and a liberal mayor as their experts to criticize President Trump’s use of the National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles and other cities to quell violence at protests against ICE’s arrest of illegal immigrants. 

NewsBusters is taking a victory lap for the House vote to claw back funding for PBS and NPR. But The Washington Post went to my neck of Wisconsin and suggested this is bad because "other radio signals are staticky and internet service can be patchy." They'd be "poorer" without the "independent option" of NPR. That's the NPR PR.

While conservatives at NewsBusters and elsewhere celebrate a major win as the House passed a rescission package that would claw back $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the liberal media didn’t greet that as a big deal at all.

So the House Republicans voted to end taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR. NPR CEO Katherine Maher has repeatedly claimed, in the face of avalanches of evidence, that she has never witnessed any bias at NPR. That’s beyond ridiculous. You can find it, day after day, hour on the hour. This week’s Los Angeles rioting provided plenty of exhibits.

MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera grew up in the 80s, and the media landscape has changed a lot since then, but on her Thursday show, she implied her family’s inability to pay for cable as a child means Congress should not approve President Trump’s rescission package that seeks to defund PBS and NPR.

Tuesday’s PBS News Hour led off with special correspondent Marcia Biggs’ nearly nine-minute segment from downtown Los Angeles, ground zero in the confrontation between Trump’s immigration enforcement and protests that often devolved into looting and rioting. Co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett noted that “700 Marines and 2,000 additional National Guard troops began arriving” on…