Public Broadcasting

For PBS NewsHour’s regular weekly recap on Friday with New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, the news that the national debt surpassed $33 trillion was deemed so unimportant that it was not mentioned. What was considered important are the internal power dynamics within the Republican Party.

New York Times columnist David Brooks went viral on "Twitter" on Wedneday for a tweet displaying a burger, fries, and a glass of booze. "This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." Brooks was so roundly mocked that on Friday's PBS NewsHour, he offered an apology that he was "stupid" and insensitive. 

PBS’s Christiane Amanpour welcomed former Vice President Al Gore to her Wednesday program to join her in attacking British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement that he will be delaying certain aspects of the country’s climate initiatives with Gore going so far as to declare young people feel “stabbed in the back.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland offered a “fiery defense” in a “grueling hearing” of a House Judiciary Committee “stocked with far-right stalwarts,” as The New York Times described it. A special bucket of opprobrium should go to what they call “public broadcasting,” PBS and NPR. On the PBS NewsHour, they could barely manage a two-minute story on the Garland hearing.

President Biden made his 2023 address Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly and, as predicted, the liberal media were there to swoon over it like North Korean propagandists. MSNBC played that role, touting it as a “comprehensive” set of remarks with “powerful” and “positive” messaging that showed concern for climate change and Ukraine.

On the latest edition of PBS’s weekly political journalist roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic, guest host Laura Barron-Lopez (a familiar face here at NewsBusters) set the tone right from the show’s introduction, of desperate Republicans hurling unsubstantiated accusations against the wall: "House Republicans in disarray.... Speaker Kevin McCarthy opens an impeachment inquiry…

On Thursday’s taxpayer-supported PBS NewsHour, notoriously liberal correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez interviewed two Harvard professors about their new anti-Republican tome: "Can you first establish when you, as someone who is an expert in the collapse of democracies, diagnosed that there is now a popular authoritarian movement within the Republican Party?"

Two shows that air on tax-funded PBS, the NewsHour and Amanpour & Co., invited journalist and Amanpour regular Walter Isaacson to discuss his new biography of entrepreneur Elon Musk who now owns X (formerly Twitter). The results were less cozy than the usual journalist-to-journalist validation, with the reliably liberal Isaacson getting testy over some of the questions…

New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart joined PBS NewsHour host Geoff Bennett on Friday for their regularly scheduled recap of the week’s top stories. The trio warned that because Republicans have “no evidence” or “holy cow” moment, they are “cheapening the whole impeachment process.”

When it was revealed Sept. 12 that the U.S. poverty rate spiked in 2022 for the first time in 13 years, President Joe Biden’s mouthpiece at The New York Times had some egg on his face. 

Biden aide Ian Sams put out a memo demanding the "independent media" must "ramp up the scrutiny" of House Republicans. PBS NewsHour promptly put Sams on taxpayer-funded TV to rip the Republicans for having "no evidence."

Tuesday's PBS NewsHour ran two segments on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, extending the ongoing investigations by congressional Republicans into the president’s possible involvement in his son’s business dealings. The supposedly objective tax-supported outlet showered McCarthy with “far-right” labels. A favored phrase of the…

The Tuesday edition of the taxpayer-supported PBS NewsHour featured liberal political writer Franklin Foer talking about his new biography of President Biden. But don’t expect Foer’s book, The Last President, to be a harsh expose like the dozens of books written about former President Trump. Foer just told NBC’s Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd that Biden "has been…

For the second week in a row, PBS’s weekly journalistic political roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic defended the elderly President Biden’s “mental acuity,” with the author of a new Biden biography, who also lectured the press on how to properly cover the president: By emphasizing how bad Trump is. Foer gave away his partisan leanings with a choice of pronoun: "...the recent…