The PBS News Hour marked its 50th anniversary last year (and the show’s first year deprived of taxpayer funding) with a clip package of its coverage of various historical events, while declaring the program had traditionally strove to be “even-handed to a fault.” If that were ever true, the current version of the show, co-anchored by Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, certainly can’t make that claim.
A new Media Research Center study tracked and labeled every guest that appeared on the News Hour over the first six months of 2026 -- January 1 through June 30 -- and found that liberal-Democratic leaning guests outnumbered conservative-Republican leaning guests by 234-45, a ratio of 5.2 to 1 (186 guests were rated either neutral or nonpolitical).
That ratio surpasses findings from two previous MRC studies (3.7 to 1 in March 2023 and 4.2 to 1 in May 2025), meaning the bias has gone from bad to worse since PBS lost its government subsidy.
KEY FINDINGS:
■ Liberal-Democratic guests outnumbered conservative-Republican guests by 234-45, a ratio of 5.2 to 1.
■ Of 22 appearances by Republican officials and appointees, seven were coded as anti-Trump. Of 31 appearances by Democrats, only one was coded as pro-Trump.
■ When elected officials and appointees were removed from the guest count, the ideological disparity becomes even more striking, with liberal-leaning guests outnumbering conservative-leaning guests 203-23, a ratio of 8.8 to 1.
■ Liberal-leaning journalists made 40 appearances as guests, compared to 0 appearances by conservative-leaning journalists.
On a few occasions, liberal guests appeared, but their statements were fairly neutral information and analysis, so they were not included in the tally, including pro-abortion academic Mary Ziegler and China expert Orville Schell.
PBS NewsHour should change its name to DNC Newshour with how many leftists they invite on. pic.twitter.com/AdHInUTMee
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) July 14, 2026
Liberal Guests Fearmongering Over Trump, Conservatism in 2026
The Trump Administration entered the second year of its second term attacked from all angles by the slanted guest list PBS brought on the program, with a particular emphasis on liberal journalists touting controversial new books.
For example, on January 9 MS NOW host and reporter Jacob Soboroff, author of Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age, faulted Donald Trump and Elon Musk for spreading flames of "disinformation.” Soboroff also sounded the standard doom notes about the climate "emergency" to please the PBS audience when explaining the supposed cause of the fires: "Changes in the way we live, our infrastructure is falling apart, the global climate emergency, obviously, and the politics of misinformation and disinformation all played a part."
The sole “pro-Trump” Democrat official was Nicholas Burns, U.S. Ambassador to China during the Biden administration, appearing on February 9 to support the Trump administration’s focus on the unfair trial and sentencing of Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai by Communist China.
On April 15, PBS invited pro-LGBTQ priest and activist Father James Martin to slice up Vice President J.D. Vance after Vance suggested Pope Leo was in error about the theology of just war: "What was your reaction?"
Father Martin replied, “That you have the vice president warning the vicar of Christ, who is an Augustinian, who is at that time visiting the birthplace of St. Augustine, and who knows more about St. Augustine than most people have forgotten, that he doesn't understand just war and that he doesn't understand theology, I just found that really hard to swallow.”
Bennett sat with former FBI Director James Comey for a 10-minute interview May 18, ostensibly to discuss Comey’s new fiction thriller, but mostly to let Bennett elicit condemnation of President Trump in response to Comey’s indictment by the Department of Justice for his 2025 Instagram post composed of seashells on the beach in the shape of the number "8647," which could be interpreted as an assassination reference.
Bennett: …do you think the administration and President Trump, particularly, are they focused on securing a conviction or is the process itself a form of punishment?
After Comey agreed, Bennett got moralistic: “Do you think, is silence itself these days is a form of complicity?...How much damage under President Trump do you think has been done to the Justice Department? And is it irreparable?”
For its May 19 show, PBS invited the worst possible guest expert to comment on a deadly shooting at an Islamic center in San Diego: The deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has a long history of vicious hostility to Israel. The group’s executive director, Nihad Awad, declared himself happy about the October 7 massacre while speaking to American Muslims for Palestine. That didn’t phase PBS.
On June 12, Bennett interviewed leftist rocker Bruce Springsteen at his new Center for American Music museum. PBS liked the appearance so much it aired an extended version on Independence Day weekend. The host was gushing.
Geoff Bennett: You said before that loving your country means telling the truth about it. How has that guided your work?
Bruce Springsteen: Well, I believe in critical patriotism. I believe that's the definition of a patriot, that you love your country so much that you are willing to look at it clearly, recognize its faults, encourage it to be a better place, and believe that you carry in your heart the country that is waiting.
By contrast, January 20 actually featured a voice who discussed the Trump Administration in a non-fascist context. The News Hour identified scholar Ilya Shapiro as a fellow at the "conservative Manhattan Institute," while the parade of liberal guests weren’t slapped with ideological labels. Placing Trump’s actions in the context of what previous presidents had done in power and refusing to link Trumpism to fascism, Shapiro marked one of the few instances of a conservative viewpoint broaching PBS’s liberal bubble.
Objective Journalists or Liberal Mouthpieces?
On the January 27 show, Howard Bryant, former left-wing columnist for ESPN The Magazine, lionized heroic athlete Jackie Robinson and infamous black Stalinist and actor Paul Robeson in a new book, Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. Host Bennett asked Bryant: “Paul Robeson, we should remind folks, was a giant of his time. Is his disappearance from popular memory, is that a historical accident or a deliberate act of forgetting?”
Bryant ignored Robeson’s unrepentant Stalinism to portray his subject as a victim of McCarthyism: “It's a 100 percent deliberate act. And it shows the power of the Cold War and the power of McCarthyism and so much of the language that we're hearing today about enemy of the people and the enemy within. This is what it was back then."
Maxine Joselow, climate reporter for the New York Times, appeared on the February 12 edition to lament the Environmental Protection Agency repealing the Obama administration’s assessment that greenhouse gases threaten public health: “[Environmental advocates] say this is going to essentially take the U.S. out of the fight to combat climate change at a time when, as you said, the impacts are only growing more clear, from the wildfires in Los Angeles last year, to the flooding in Texas that claimed dozens of lives. Those climate disasters are going to continue and accelerate, and the U.S. government will no longer be playing any role in attempting to contain that.”
Bennett spoke June 17 with journalist Nicole Carr about her book, The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation. When Bennett asked Carr why blacks make up 14 percent of the population but only 5 percent of doctors, she blamed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as well as “scholarship funds and endowments…being challenged for racial discrimination,” and warned of “a formalized Jim Crow America” on the horizon.
“Settle In” to Bias
In 2026 PBS introduced “Settle In,” a video podcast hosted in rotating fashion by News Hour co-anchors Bennett and Nawaz, which became a convenient way to sneak in favored topics and guests with agreeable ideologies. Out of 19 “Settle In” excerpts that aired at the end of News Hour newscasts, eight featured liberal guests versus one conservative (two appearances by News Hour staff as guests weren’t counted).
In a portion that aired February 26, Michael Harriot, a left-wing journalist at Grio.com, sat down to discuss Black History Month and his book "Black AF History." We learned the first European settlers were incompetent and that “For most black children in America, we have been educated to revere men who are white supremacists.”
In an interview offered on April 16, comedian Dave Chappelle’s tour of his adopted home of Yellow Springs, Ohio, included a helpful shoutout to both PBS and another previously tax-funded media outlet, National Public Radio. (Chappelle invested money to help the local NPR station, WYSO.) He told Nawaz: “The more you empower institutions like PBS or like NPR, the more they can be ours, of and for the people. I think now, more than ever, it`s been proven that that`s necessary. There has to be some baseline of truth. And good journalism is a godsend at a time like this. So I support it.”
On May 26, PBS excerpted a “Settle In” interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian and author Jon Meacham, a liberal media favorite and Biden speechwriter and cheerleader, though Nawaz downplayed that tie.
And on June 2, Bennett introduced Nawaz’s sympathetic interview with emotional liberal journalist Michael Edison Hayden, someone who “has spent years tracking extremism in America. His new book, ‘Strange People on the Hill,’ tracks what happened when a far-right group moved its headquarters to a small town in rural West Virginia.” From Hayden’s biography: “As a reporter, he broke some of the biggest stories on the radical right over the last decade, and his analyses—featured in outlets like NPR, MSNBC, and CNN—helped shape perspectives on the authoritarian, anti-democracy movement that took over the Republican Party.”
Not until June 30, the last day of the study period, did “Settle In” host a conservative-leaning guest -- Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, criticizing the mainstream media for unfair coverage of him.
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METHODOLOGY: People who appeared on the PBS News Hour were defined as guests if they appeared in studio or talked to a host or in-studio reporter remotely. Also included as guests were sole subjects of field profiles, as well as subjects of the show’s occasional “Brief But Spectacular” segments, and guests featured in excerpts from the PBS News podcast “Settle In.”
Guests were defined as either liberal or conservative based on the subject matter and content of the interview, or classified as neutral if neither designation applied. Elected officials and political appointees were included in the tally as Democrats or Republicans -- defined as current or recently retired officeholders at the federal, state, and local level, as well as those who served in the Biden White House or served previously or currently in the Trump White House, or were appointed to their position during the Biden or Trump administrations.
Regular PBS News Hour pundits were excluded from the guest tally. Guests included in the tally: All other journalists, both reporters and columnists, as well as academics, activists, think tank staffers, etc., who advanced partisan or ideological positions in their interviews.
