Fleeing the sinking ship? Laura Barron-Lopez, perhaps the most biased reporter on the tax-funded PBS News Hour, is bolting to cable network MSNBC, a more obvious place for her unapologetic liberal slant, in a move revealed by The Hollywood Reporter a few weeks ago. She follows on the heels of Yamiche Alcindor, who made a similar trek from PBS to MSNBC.
Barron-Lopez joined the PBS News Hour as White House correspondent from Politico in June 2022 and quickly established herself as hostile to conservatives, especially defending the falsehood of “gender-affirming care” for teenage transgenders, a stance that flies in the face of biology and recent medical recommendations.
Fittingly, her last story for the News Hour, on July 18, was a critical report on President Trump’s crackdown on admitting refugees. We've compiled some of Barron-Lopez's greatest journalistic misses below, a robust list that doesn't even go back a full year.
Laura Barron-Lopez’s Transgender Obsession
“The president is also expected to continue his attacks on transgender people as he moves to roll back rights for them across the states.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour before Trump’s speech to Congress, March 4, 2025.
“Last week, President Trump signed an executive order targeting gender-affirming care for minors….The order also threatens to withhold federal funding from hospitals or institutions that may also happen to provide gender-affirming care….Trump's actions have been very sweeping when it comes to trying to dismantle some transgender rights. That includes instructing the government to acknowledge only two genders, moving trans women to men's prisons, directing the DOD to reinstitute the trans military ban, and stopping social transitioning in schools.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, February 4, 2025.
“Now, after an election in which Donald Trump and Republicans promised to roll back protections for transgender Americans, the Supreme Court is wading into the issue. The outcome could dramatically alter the lives of youth like Givens, who in 2022, at the age of 17, underwent gender-affirming chest reconstruction, also known as top surgery.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, December 4, 2024.
“Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population identifies as transgender. But this election year, Republicans have spent a considerable amount of money on ads demonizing transgender people.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, November 2, 2024.
Defending the Judge Who Hid an Illegal Migrant From ICE
“Again, Judge Dugan was arrested on the grounds of a Milwaukee courthouse where she presides, according to the U.S. Marshals Office. And so that kind of spectacle, which is what Asha said, may be sending a chilling effect to others across the legal community.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, April 25, 2025.
Fever Over Loss of Leftist Fact-Checking
“We heard some of the president's response to that tonight, when he specifically talked about social media giving up on fact-checking and he talked about the level of disinformation and the tech-industrial, across the tech-industrial complex, which is what he called it….they ultimately have blamed some of that on this new information environment that the country is in, on lies spread across, easily across social media, and the responsibility that this president believes the people in charge of those social media companies believe have in trying to make sure that facts are what reach the public and not lies and disinformation.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour after President Biden’s farewell address, January 16, 2025.
Trump Loves Dictators
“President-elect Trump has openly embraced a number of strongman leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Trump has also said that he would be a dictator for a day. He has expressed a desire to seek revenge against his political enemies, and he's also threatened to use the military against civilians during times of civil unrest. If Donald Trump ends up governing like a strongman, what does that mean for the future of democracy?...What could a second Trump term mean in terms of emboldening extremists or those who hold far-right views about the future of the country?” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, November 27, 2024.
Kamala = Joy!
“[Delegates] really think that Kamala Harris should embrace who she is and one of her signature personality traits is that she often likes to laugh and bring joy to what she's doing and that's something that a lot of delegates have talked to me about tonight….A lot of her story makes many of the Democrats here tonight feel as though they’re being seen, sometimes for the first time.” -- PBS News Hour White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on Night Two of PBS coverage of the Democratic National Convention, August 20, 2024.
Mocking Kamala Is Racist
“In the past, we’ve seen sexist, racist remarks made against candidates like Barack Obama, made against Hillary Clinton when she ran. Are you concerned at all just about the road that Vice President Harris faces?” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, August 5, 2024.
“But one thing that they have been doing a lot, Geoff, is they have been calling Vice President Harris a DEI hire -- diversity, equity, inclusion, hire -- and that's included some Republican lawmakers, allies of Trump….And a lot of the black Democratic organizers that I spoke to said that calling Harris a DEI hire is just another dog whistle. And then Donald Trump again recently on the campaign trail repeatedly mispronounced Kamala Harris' name.…And this is something that Donald Trump did in 2020 as well. He and his surrogates repeatedly mispronounced her name. And a lot of Democrats have said that it's just another dog whistle.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, July 25, 2024.
Trump Is the New Joe McCarthy
“Don Moynihan of the University of Michigan compared this to the 1950s McCarthy era, where civil servants had to be vetted for loyalty under this guise of rooting out communists, essentially. And Moynihan said that sometimes that meant that they would target who they -- quote -- 'deemed as deviants,' like LGBTQ people.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, November 19, 2024.
Huh?
“There is an entire right wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream.” -- PBS News Hour White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez on CNN’s Inside Politics, November 7, 2024.
Oops
“[Kamala] Harris even appears to have a slight lead in decidedly red Iowa. The final Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll shows Harris ahead by three points among Iowa voters.” -- White House reporter Laura-Barron-Lopez on PBS News Hour, November 4, 2024. Harris would lose Iowa by 13 points.
