Public Broadcasting

National Public Radio’s pop-culture show “It’s Been a Minute” bravely tackled the made-up problem of racist country music, in the wake of the failed censorship of singer Jason Aldrean’s hit “Try That in a Small Town.” Tax-funded NPR blurbed the August 1 radio segment under this heading: “How racism became a marketing tool for country music.”

Another Biden family payment scandal meant another goose egg of coverage on public television’s flagship evening news program the PBS NewsHour. On Wednesday, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer released records detailing payments Biden family members have received from oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The revelations were predictably ignored by the “big three”…

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik filed yet another of his anti-Fox News Channel pieces for Wednesday's Morning Edition. The headline? "A former Fox executive now argues Murdoch is unfit to own TV stations.": This means Folkfenlik has filed 44 anti-Fox News stories so far in 2023.

For the latest installment of their documentary series, The Human Footprint, PBS took a look at the history of cotton from both a political and scientific perspective. On the former, host and evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton warned that there attempts to “reinstitute many of the barriers that long kept African-Americans from wielding political power.”

Terry Gross, host of the National Public Radio talk show Fresh Air, conducted two separate interviews on succeeding days with Annie Karni, a former White House correspondent for the New York Times who is now congressional correspondent for the paper, a discussion dominated by fears of the “far-right” Congress. The loaded ideological labeling that emanated from both…

After three and a half years, there’s still no immunity from COVID hysteria at the New York Times or PBS NewsHour. A slight, predictable summer uptick in COVID cases (up from very low levels) caused a mini-frenzy in the liberal media, which were always eager to enjoin citizens to “mask up” and get their umpteenth booster shot while shunning other people. Both outlets relied on…

Two publicly funded media outlets, National Public Radio and the PBS NewsHour, sponsored a Marist poll to find out how Republicans feel about an issue the press has decided is urgent -- “climate change.” To their horror, it found Republicans would rather preserve living standards for humans rather than throw their money at somehow stopping the temperature from rising. NPR’s…

Amanpour & Co’s idea of a balanced segment on the news of Donald Trump’s third indictment for “conspiring to defraud” the United States for contesting his loss in 2020? Hosting a sitting liberal Democrat, Rep. Joe Neguse, and the ex-Republican (in all senses) Rep. Joe Walsh, who ran against Trump in the 2020 primary and remains fiercely opposed. Amanpour’s Tuesday evening…

The PBS NewsHour is once again indulging the apocalyptic fears of residents of the liberal bubble (i.e. their viewing audience) with a full segment on the psychological woes wrought by…climate change. On Sunday’s edition of the tax-supported program, anchor John Yang interviewed a “climate psychology therapist” over this rather niche, first-world woe.

PBS NewsHour’s weekly recap with New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart began with a discussion on, of all things, Republican attitudes towards climate change. During the discussion, Brooks, the supposedly conservative half of the duo, reduced oil drilling to a simple way of Republicans to offend elite…

Wednesday’s PBS NewsHour featured a chat with radical (Pulitzer Prize winning) journalist Wesley Lowery about his new book on how white Americans and the Republican Party became scared and possibly dangerous racists after Barack Obama’s election. Lowery is making the book-tour rounds publicizing American Whitelash. Lowery, formerly a journalist for the Washington Post…