News Hour

Four weeks into the second term of President Trump, it's painfully clear that the "Public Broadcasting Service" loathes Trump and his "government efficiency" czar, billionaire Elon Musk. They don't say the reason out loud, but Musk has made clear he thinks "public" broadcasting should be defunded. He's Public Broadcasting Enemy #1. 

PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks came together on Friday to mourn the first month of Donald Trump 2.0. Together, the trio would lament the supposed lack of “guardrails” that is allowing Trump to run “roughshod” over the government in pursuit of “Ivy League right-wing nihilism.”

If PBS wants to combat accusations that the tax-funded news network is a haven for smug elitist politics (PBS, where even the conservatives are liberal!), Thursday night’s segment featuring former New York Times columnist and (once) respected economist Paul Krugman wasn’t the way to go about it. Krugman really leaned into his natural unlikability in the remote interview with PBS’s…

One of the reasons I have long inveighed against “public” TV is its tendency to avoid authentic conservative opinion. For almost 20 years now, Exhibit A has been PBS News Hour pundit David Brooks. PBS picked up David Brooks as its supposedly right-leaning Friday night opinionator in 2004, shortly after he became a New York Times columnist in 2003.

The pundits may say Democrats are still "licking their wounds" from their 2024 defeats, but the recent Democrat meeting on February 1 focusing on how they must have a "non-binary" representative was underplayed by the media. Joe Klein used to be a prominent TV pundit and Newsweek columnist who loved Bill Clinton's more moderate style. On his Substack, he lamented the party now…

The iconoclastic news site The Free Press had a Monday evening scoop, courtesy of an inside tipster, that taxpayer-funded news network PBS was trying to conceal its DEI program from President Trump’s executive order and Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): "...we wrote to PBS asking them about a tip we received from a high-ranking executive at the…

PBS News Weekend guest host Ali Rogin promised that a Saturday evening segment would “explore the deep roots of DEI in this country as it comes under increasing attack,” and it certainly delivered a strong if false defense, comparing the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” push to the fight against Jim Crow, with the host agreeing wholly with the segment’s sole guest, an activist…

Just in time to stir up resistance to the Trump Administration’s whirlwind of government change, PBS is beginning a series called “On Democracy,” which aims to go beyond the day to day news “to look at big questions about the changing laws, institutions and norms.” PBS News Hour co-host Amna Nawaz conducted the series’ first interview on Thursday’s edition, with Barton Gellman from…

Against the backdrop of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting initiatives, Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart got triggered on Friday’s PBS News Hour when the American Enterprise Institute’s Matthew Continetti reminded him that former President Joe Biden abused executive power on his student loan order. Capehart argued that comparisons were “apples and…

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The filing of a lawsuit by the litigious, now wholly left-wing ACLU isn’t exactly a stop-the-presses moment, but Tuesday night’s edition of the PBS News Hour treated it as such. Co-host Amna Nawaz set up the show’s most liberal correspondent, Laura Barron-Lopez, in support of the same “gender-affirming care” misnomer PBS has used in its previous excessive coverage of so-called…

PBS News Hour ran full stories on the hearings for Kash Patel to head the FBI, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services. All suffered bruising and sometimes bipartisan criticism, and the coverage was deeply unfavorable to all three nominees. Gabbard perhaps got the worst of it, with tough questioning about…

Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart had an eventful time on Friday’s installment of PBS NewsHour. First, Capehart did his typical thing where he alleged President Trump’s recent press conference included “some of the most racist things I have ever heard come out of the White House.” Later, he said something so absurd that the usually amenable New York Times…

The average American awards some amount of undeserved prestige to "public" TV and radio merely by the branding of "public," like it's for all the people. But PBS and NPR are not acting for the entire "public." They are taxpayer-subsidized propaganda, and they often ignore or downplay news events that they do not support. Exhibit A for Abortion: the annual March for Life, which draws…