Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been facing criticism and scorn from some media members for having the audacity to mildly criticize President Obama and some administration officials while Obama is still in office. On Tuesday, Gates appeared on the PBS NewsHour to face another round of questioning about his newly released memoir.
Midway through the interview, anchor Judy Woodruff suggested that the former defense secretary could lower morale among troops on the ground overseas:
Jeffrey Brown


Ultraliberal Congressman Alan Grayson was interviewed on Thursday’s PBS NewsHour, and struck a fierce pose against missile strikes in Syria in a peace-sign tie. Anchor Jeffrey Brown repeatedly questioned how cavalier Grayson seemed in protecting a president of his own party.
From Obama’s corner, Brown began by asking what kind of message inaction would send to Syria. Grayson said “if you want to send a message, use Hallmark, not missiles.” It’s a lame joke, since Hallmark isn’t making cards for special occasions like chemical weapons attacks on civilians. Brown kept sputtering about how he could let Obama down:

Anyone who’s actually seen the cartoonish Sarah Palin as a mentally imbalanced fruitcake in the HBO movie “Game Change” would laugh (or throw their remote-control) at the sound of the movie’s Jay Roach appearing on the PBS NewsHour on Tuesday night. PBS assembled a panel of political-entertainment makers.
Anchor Jeffrey Brown asked Roach, “How do you fictionalize what you see, you said you see as a kind of [political] dysfunction?” Roach insisted his liberal-propaganda HBO movies were non-fictional:

PBS led off Thursday’s NewsHour with a story about President Obama’s efforts to defend his healthcare law amid increasing public skepticism. But the taxpayer-funded network managed to avoid mentioning the recent harsh criticism of the law from three prominent labor union leaders, despite a vague reference to “worry from some supporters.”
Anchor Jeffrey Brown, who narrated the package, acknowledged, “Today's speech was part of a broader effort to sell the law that comes amid continuing criticism from Republicans and worry from some supporters about its implementation.”
For the second time in a regular news story, PBS mentioned the trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell on Tuesday’s NewsHour. And yet Gosnell was not the subject of the story in question. The mention came at the tail end of a piece on the battle over abortion restrictions in state legislatures.
Anchor Jeffrey Brown presented the trial as the concern of “anti-abortion activists”:

With the Boy Scouts now in the national spotlight, Scouts for Equality founder and gay rights activist Zack Wahls was featured on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday night opposite Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. While intended as a civil, constructive conversation, Wahls insinuated that Land was a bigot since, for people like him, “this is about the problems you have with parents like mine.” Wahls has two moms, born to one biologically through artificial insemination.
PBS NewsHour host Jeffrey Brown did not push back on Wahls's unwarranted attack on Land’s conservative views, and seemed to have temporarily lost control of the interview. Furthermore, Wahls proceeded to attack conservative principles, in general, which he derided as “from the last century.” That's the sort of discussion we're paying for with our tax dollars.
Another day, another iteration of the left-wing criticism of Al Gore’s sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. On Thursday’s PBS NewsHour, co-anchor Jeffrey Brown interviewed the former vice president and, predictably, the sale of Gore’s television channel came up. Like Matt Lauer and Andrea Mitchell before him, Brown failed to question Gore’s decision to sell to a network with a history of espousing anti-American views.
Instead, Brown rehashed the hypocrisy question, even though he knew it had been asked before: [View video after the jump. MP3 audio here]

During PBS’ coverage of the 2013 Inauguration, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Gwen Ifill, and Yale University’s Beverly Gage seemed to have forgotten what the definition of liberal is within the context of Obama’s second inaugural address. In fact, Gage said that this wasn’t an “endorsement of collective liberalism,” and Shields called it more “humanitarian.”
The non-taxpayer subsidized liberal media has been more honest. Today’s New York Times said Obama offered a “liberal vision.” Slate’s John Dickerson, who infamously called for Obama to destroy the GOP, called the 44th president’s address “a liberal love letter.” ABC finally figured out that Obama is a progressive liberal.
Is it the government’s job to spread happiness? A former president of Harvard University, who was profiled on the June 2 PBS “NewsHour,” seems to think so. Derek Bok, author of The Politics of Happiness, believes the government should be in the business of manufacturing happiness.
“I think a government that tries, systematically, to relieve what causes lasting misery and emphasize what gives lasting happiness will eventually win the support of the people,” declared Bok.
In a telling review, Sara Robinson of the wildly liberal blog Firedoglake expressed adoration for the book:
It reads like a progressive wish list — a ratification of the kind of ‘for the common good’ policies we’ve always stood for. But Bok’s approach is academic and disinterested and acutely non-ideological: he reaches these conclusions only because the preponderance of data proves (once again!) that reality has a distinctly liberal bias.
