For more than five decades, conservative and Republican taxpayers were forced to subsidize PBS and their routinely leftist "news," or messaging. In the midterms, we have found again that they overwhelmingly pounce on the Republicans with negative spin. Nobody can argue that spinning against the GOP 94 percent of the time is synonymous with "the truth."
MRC Director of Media Analysis Geoff Dickens and MRC Free Speech America vice president Dan Schneider join the show to discuss our recent studies. First up: Clay Waters studied the PBS News Hour political coverage from September 1 to 30. The Republicans received 94% negative spin vs. 6% positive spin. The Democrats received far more balanced coverage, 53% negative, 47% positive. It was more stark in the number of evaluations: the GOP split was 102 to 6, the Democrats 10 to 9. So Republicans had about five times as many evaluations, and still Democrats has more positive evaluations than the GOP.
Their campaign coverage could bungle the facts. PBS Friday night pundit David Brooks projected “some stray people who seem safe and they lose. I have got a sneaking suspicion. In Kansas, a guy named Adam Hamilton, Democrat, is running for governor.” Wrong. He's running for Senate. Brooks suggested Kansas hasn't had a Democrat governor recently, when Democrat Laura Kelly has been in office for eight years. Geoff Bennett brought on so-called “lifelong Republican” Bill Graves to endorse Hamilton, just as he endorsed Kelly twice.
We also discussed:
Non-Citizen Voting Study: Dickens underlined that from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to Minnesota, illegal immigrants have been swept up by the Trump administration for trying to cast a ballot. So in the last month, how much time did the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) network news shows devote to these cases? ZERO seconds. They did cover New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s July announcement that 6600 non-citizens ended up on their voting rolls, but that was a one-day story. The numbers here are not high, three here and ten there. But you can’t say there's No Evidence of improper voting. When they say there's "no evidence," you can guess they weren't looking for evidence.
Apple News Studies: Our Free Speech America team found Apple News failed to promote a single story about the DNC’s bad news about being in debt among its top 20 stories from January 1 through September 28, effectively shielding the Democrat shortfall from public view less than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term and months ahead of the 2026 midterms.
They also found Apple News has taken a decidedly leftist turn since John Ternus took over as CEO from Tim Cook. Already the most anti-conservative news app, Apple’s news aggregator went from promoting only 13 stories from right-leaning outlets in August to pushing a paltry three in September. The news app pushed stories from left-leaning outlets 65% of the time compared to just 2% from right-leaning outlets in August. In September, it was 67%Meanwhile, it increased the percentage of stories from leftist outlets it promoted to 67% left-leaning to just 0.5 percent from the right-leaning media. Apple News doesn't use an algorithm. They choose each story for Apple users.
Finally, many TV news stars tried to convince the public that President Trump urged Iran to take out Los Angeles and San Diego. It wasn't an eloquent moment, but that's not what he said. He ended by saying we'd stop that. But it’s another example of how Trump Loathing comes before the context. Even CNN "fact checker" Daniel Dale, whose entire job seems to be attacking Trump, tweeted several times that Trump was being taken out of context -- even if that never made it to TV or CNN.com
Enjoy the podcast below. The audio is here.
