Media Bias Debate

Wednesday night sounded like "Protect My Public Media" night on NPR and PBS. NPR's All Things Considered put on their CEO Katherine Maher for what was basically seven-minute pledge drive for federal funding. She unveiled another unintentional laugh line. Asked about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saying they'd have to "hate us on your own dime," Maher claimed "We don't hate anyone in…

Wednesday’s PBS News Hour covered the Trump administration’s efforts to cut taxpayer funding for PBS and National Public Radio. PBS didn’t present its critics beyond generalities, while anchor Amna Nawaz and reporter William Brangham took the opportunity to lobby for themselves. Anchor Amna Nawaz: As we have been reporting, the Trump administration wants to cut the federal funds that…

For the Tax Day edition of CNN’s Inside Politics on Tuesday, media correspondent Brian Stelter joined host Dana Bash to allege that President Trump wants to defund PBS and NPR for “simply covering the news.” If Stelter really believes that then he has a funny definition of what is newsworthy.

Forty-five minutes into Wednesday’s edition of the podcast Piers Morgan Uncensored, former NBC News correspondent Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd made a splash by drawing the curtain back a little on how the mainstream press concealed President Biden’s mental decline because of fear of being seen by their colleagues as helping Trump by hurting Biden (how did that work out…

On Friday's episode of CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish surprisingly praises Marco Rubio's take on revoking student visas as "common sense." But Cornish once again assembles an unbalanced panel, bereft of any Trump-supporting Republican.

Firing Line host Margaret Hoover conducted a panel at the USC Center for the Political Future, taped January 30 and aired Friday as a regular episode of the long-running PBS series originated by seminal conservative William F. Buckley. The episode was advertised as “The challenges for journalism in the age of Trump.” New York Times national political reporter Adam Nagourney…

On State of the Union, when Secretary of Agriculture tells host Jake Tapper that "everyone on your side, the left" is freaking out over the Trump tariffs, Tapper insists, "I'm not on the left." Oh really?

Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd heaped scorn on conservatives while defending the indefensible –taxpayer-funded PBS and National Public Radio – as “fair and balanced” in Wednesday’s paper, in a long column under the long title “PBS and NPR cater to all Americans, despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene might believe.”

If PBS felt any concern about the hit its reputation for balance took at Wednesday’s devastating DOGE hearings, Thursday’s PBS News Hour didn’t show it. That episode took advantage of a series installed after Donald Trump won a second term, the pompously titled “On Democracy,” to suggest Project 2025 was a threat to democracy. Worse, PBS used that “On Democracy” rubric to enshrine a…

With Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart away, his former colleague Ruth Marcus stepped up to pinch-hit for him on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour. At the end of the discussion with New York Times columnist David Brooks, Marcus claimed the reason she left the Post is because owner Jeff Bezos is trying “to limit dissent” at the paper despite…

Before Wednesday’s congressional testimony from the heads of PBS and NPR in front of the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE), PBS’s flagship news show News Hour offered up some gaslighting on Tuesday evening in defense of the program’s political objectivity and balance -- a laughable proposition to anyone who has watched an episode.

Audie Cornish, the new host of CNN This Morning, has stocked her panels with left-leaning voices.  But today, she had an actual conservative on the show in the person of Rob Bluey, the President and Executive Editor of The Daily Signal. Bluey is a former reporter at Cybercast News Service, where he broke the story of Dan Rather's fake typewriter font in the phony Bush draft-evasion story. 

On CNN This Morning, in a discussion of the Trump administration's deportation of Venezuelan gang members despite a judge's order purporting to prohibit it, host Audie Cornish engages in apophasis, saying: "This is one of those things that people end up talking about constitutional crisis. I will try not to kickoff Monday with that term, but . . . "

On Monday's Morning Joe, MSNBC gave author Steve Oney a forum to promote his book, On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, and to lament the possibility that the "down the middle" NPR will be defunded by Republicans.