Paula Kerger, chief executive of the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), recently told the New York Times, “In terms of the news, we work really hard to try to bring multiple viewpoints forward.”
But as the second Trump administration begins and PBS comes under unprecedented existential pressure from the administration for its liberally biased evening news product, a review of coverage of the first four months of Trump II proves the PBS News Hour still occupies a liberal bubble, and it’s sealed tight as ever.
A new Media Research Center study tracked and labeled every guest that appeared on the News Hour over the first four months of Trump’s second term -- January 20, 2025 (Inauguration Day) through May 19, 2025 -- and found that liberal-Democratic leaning guests outnumbered conservative-Republican leaning guests by 173-41, a ratio of 4.2 to 1 (106 guests were rated either neutral or politically unrelated). That gap surpassed findings from an analogous MRC study conducted two years ago, which uncovered a ratio of 3.7 to 1.
Yet even those figures understate the program’s true slant, as many of the Republican and conservative guests opposed Trump on a variety of issues and controversies, including military issues, program cuts, and deportation of illegal immigrants.
Key Findings:
■ Liberal-Democratic guests outnumbered conservative-Republican guests by 173-41, a ratio of 4.2 to 1.
■ Of 18 total appearances by Republican officials, eight were coded as anti-Trump. Of 24 total appearances by Democratic officials, none were pro-Trump.
■ When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the ideological disparity of show guests becomes even more striking, with liberal-leaning guests outnumbering conservative-leaning guests 149-23, for a ratio of 6.5 to 1.
■ Liberal journalists made 22 appearances as guests, compared to just one appearance by a conservative journalist.
■ The ideological breakdown of guests on the News Hour’s new “On Democracy” segment was nearly balanced, 6-5 liberal-conservative. But the difference in hostility during the interviews themselves showed PBS’s liberal ideology had not changed.
Liberal Guests Fearmongering Over Trump 2.0
The incoming administration was attacked from all angles by PBS guests, who were encouraged to unload on Trump and budget-cutting Elon Musk by News Hour interviewers.
Steve Vladeck, constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, made an impressive five appearances over the study period to fearmonger over Trump and the Supreme Court and Trump’s use or abuse of executive authority, deportations and due process. This same liberal expert came on PBS to defend Hillary Clinton on her email scandal in 2016.
Natasha Sarin appeared twice in the study period to criticize cuts to the IRS by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Sarin worked for the Treasury Department during the Biden administration, but PBS failed to provide that information, or the fact that she contributed $750 to the Biden campaign in 2020.
On March 19, host Geoff Bennett conducted a 13-minute interview with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and it was challenging -- from the Left. PBS began with a video medley of Democratic leaders expressing their fury at Schumer for voting in favor of a continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown. The online headline for the interview summarized the tilt: “‘We had an awful choice’: Schumer defends voting with GOP saying shutdown would be worse.”
Wouldn’t a balanced PBS moderate between Democrats and Republicans in policy disputes? Instead, PBS anchor Geoff Bennett pressed Schumer: "Why not be as tactically ruthless as Republicans have shown themselves to be?"
The March 28 show brought a welcome bit of balance, as two Princeton University professors, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, discussed their book lamenting “public health” bureaucratic overreach during America’s panicked, authoritarian reaction to the COVID pandemic.
Yale professor Jason Stanley went on the News Hour on April 1 and ranted to anchor Nawaz about how he was escaping to Canada because America was sinking into fascism under Trump. As usual, no conservatives were interviewed to offer a rebuttal.
PBS, like the other networks, devoted oodles of sympathy to infamous “Maryland man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia while covering the controversy of the Trump administration’s supposedly unjust deportation of the El Salvadoran illegal and suspected MS-13 gang member.
Reporter Laura Barron-Lopez was joined April 15 by guest Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University, who relayed a sympathetic story on Garcia’s behalf: “He was a teenager. His mother sold pupusas. Gangs were trying to extort her and threatening her children and wanted her to put them into the gangs. He was sent here by his family. He's never broken any laws here. There are no criminal convictions here...”
A News Hour favorite, McCord had in January defended Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family’s financial controversies.
Republican Party Poopers
Of 18 total appearances by Republican elected officials or political appointees, eight were anti-Trump (three of those eight appearances were from one person, retired Rear Admiral James McPherson, criticizing various military moves by Trump). By contrast, of 24 total appearances by Democratic elected officials or political appointees, none were pro-Trump. Also notice that, somehow more Democrats (often disgruntled Biden bureaucrats taking aim at Trump) managed to appear on the PBS News Hour than did Republicans, even though Republicans would seem to be more newsworthy, given their control of both Congress and the presidency.
When those elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the ideological disparity of show guests becomes even more striking, with liberal-leaning guests outnumbering conservative-leaning guests 149-23, for a ratio of 6.5 to 1.
Journalists as Guests
Besides its own roster of reliably liberal reporters (White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez is typically the most slanted), the PBS guest list was stuffed with liberal journalists from other outlets as well. Over the four-month study period, identifiably liberal journalists made 22 appearances as guests, compared to just one appearance by a conservative journalist -- cartoonist Michael Ramirez, interviewed for a segment that also featured liberal former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who sketched Donald Trump conducting with a swastika-tipped baton. Subtle!
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic (and moderator of the PBS weekly roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic) appeared twice to talk about his accidental inclusion on a sensitive military “group chat.”
Paul Krugman, the former New York Times columnist, leaned into his partisanship in his February 13 appearance. PBS’s resident economics reporter Paul Solman drew Krugman out on the stupidity of low-income Trump voters, “We know that Trump won heavily among people who pay very little attention to the news.”
Brian Stelter, editor of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter (and reliable white knight for the liberal media) appeared on the February 25 show to discuss the “chilling effect” of the Trump administration blocking the Associated Press from the White House reporter pool. He borrowed a ridiculous Soviet-era comparison from White House correspondent Peter Baker of The New York Times, who wrote that “these changes remind him of how the Kremlin took over the press pool and banned certain outlets….So he sees parallels here to what's happened in more repressive countries in the past.”
The March 3 “On Democracy” segment featured Nobel Peace Prize laureate and investigative journalist Maria Ressa. Bennett bluntly forwarded the maximalist anti-Trump angle, featuring Trump as autocrat: “[Ressa’s] book How to Stand Up to a Dictator detailed her experience running the news site Rappler under the increasingly autocratic regime of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. She recently sat down with Amna Nawaz to discuss parallels she's seeing between the Philippines and the U.S. under President Trump….”
On March 14, the News Hour invited on Sarah Brown, senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, to accuse Trump of withholding aid from elite colleges as “part of this larger effort by the Trump administration to try to have universities in alignment with his agenda. That`s really what is underlying everything that we`re seeing here with DEI programs, with these protesters and potential deportations of protesters.” No opposing view was offered.
Guest host William Brangham gave New York Times reporter David Enrich a sympathetic March 17 interview to promote his anti-Trump book Murder The Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. The online headline provided the flavor: “‘Murder the Truth’ examines growing effort to silence journalists and curtail free speech.”
Enrich provided a laughable liberal media cliché, insisting that Trump’s fight against the Supreme Court precedent in New York Times vs. Sullivan (which set a high standard in defamation cases against public figures) was: “already causing a really severe chilling effect on the ability of everyone from a normal citizen to someone with a Substack newsletter or podcast to journalists at major news outlets being able to really properly scrutinize and hold powerful people to account.”
“On Democracy” Hypocrisy
After a relatively mild first two weeks -- perhaps shell shock from Trump’s win? – the News Hour got its liberal groove back with a new series, the portentously titled “On Democracy,” which News Hour co-host Amna Nawaz promised would go beyond the day to day news “to look at big questions about the changing laws, institutions and norms.” How convenient that those became pertinent media questions only after Donald Trump began his second term.
The recurring segment launched February 6 with guest Barton Gellman of the left-wing Brennan Center. After Nawaz asked Gellman if the courts are "sort of the most robust guardrail" against Trump, Nawaz fretted about an American descent into authoritarianism. This came after four years of PBS ignoring unilateral moves by the Biden administration on college loan forgiveness and COVID vaccine mandates.
The “On Democracy” segment aired 11 times through May 19, and the ideological breakdown of guests was surprisingly balanced, 6-5 liberal-conservative. That might seem like a recognition that PBS knows it has a problem and is trying to solve it. But the interviews themselves fell back into the same liberal grooves, with conservative guests employed as punching bags and liberal guests treated with all respect.
Nawaz practically seethed at her conservative guest Michael Knowles during their February 20 interview, blasting him in this exchange on transgenderism after he made a point about the concept spreading via social contagion.
Nawaz: Michael, you realize this is the same argument people made about gay people, right?
Knowles: Well, I'm talking about the whole LGBT ideology. So I suppose, in some ways, I'm making that argument myself.
Nawaz: You don't believe that gay people exist?
Yet three days beforehand, in an “On Democracy” segment February 17, Nawaz set up radical-left Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele to imply President Trump was a fascist dictator who would use immigrants and transgenders as scapegoats.
Nawaz: We have also seen the targeting with very specific groups like immigrants and transgender people. Is that something you have seen before?
Scheppele rose to the liberal bait.
Scheppele: Absolutely. Picking scapegoats is partly a way of generating public approval for people who don't like the scapegoats. But it's also a way of saying to people who might challenge this government, this could happen to you. So if you step out of line, you can see what happens. You fall into this abyss of arbitrary treatment, where the law cannot protect you and where we are going to come after you.
Nawaz: We have also seen the targeting with very specific groups like immigrants and transgender people. Is that something you have seen before?
Scheppele: Absolutely. Picking scapegoats is partly a way of generating public approval for people who don`t like the scapegoats. But it’s also a way of saying to people who might challenge this government, this could happen to you. So if you step out of line, you can see what happens. You fall into this abyss of arbitrary treatment, where the law cannot protect you and where we are going to come after you.
Another “On Democracy” guest, law professor Ilya Shapiro, was introduced as hailing from the “conservative-leaning” Manhattan Institute, which was either to provide an ideological warning label, or perhaps the beleaguered network drawing attention to the fact that it was trying to be balanced.
Still, Shapiro didn’t get softball questions but was peppered with dubious questions from co-host Geoff Bennett about Trump’s claims of executive authority like this: “There have been arguments, as you well know, that we are either in or that we're approaching a constitutional crisis. I’d imagine you would disagree with that. But what to you would signal a constitutional crisis? What to you, would signal that this democratic experiment is in peril?”
Even one of the ostensibly Republican guests for “On Democracy,” Alberto Gonzales, who served as Attorney General during the George W. Bush administration, was invited onto the April 30 broadcast to relay his anti-Trump position.
Nawaz introduced him as a Kamala Harris voter and for having called Trump "the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation." Nawaz’s last question to him: “Attorney General, you called Donald Trump the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation. Based on the norm-breaking and the rule-bending we have seen so far, are you worried that you can't get it back once it`s gone?”
As demonstrated, the News Hour guest list was dominated by radical professors, disgruntled Democratic bureaucrats, and legacy media liberals -- an unwise stance for a tax-funded network that operates (for now) under a congressional mandate to maintain "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”
METHODOLOGY: The study covered a four-month period, using a Nexis search of News Hour transcripts from Jan 20, 2025 (Inauguration Day) through May 19, 2025, encompassing every edition of the PBS News Hour, Monday through Friday, for a total of 86 episodes of news coverage. (Not included: The half-hour PBS News Weekend show, a separate entity with different hosts that airs on Saturday and Sunday.)
Guests were defined as interview subjects if they appeared in studio or talked to a host or in-studio reporter remotely. Also included as guests were main subjects of field profiles, as well as the show’s occasional “Brief But Spectacular” segments, in which a single guest talked without interaction from an interviewee. Guests were defined as either liberal or conservative based on the subject matter and content of the interview, or classified as non-applicable if neither designation applied.
Elected officials and political appointees were included in the tally -- defined as current or recently retired officeholders at the federal, state, and local level, as well as those who currently serve 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 pundits were excluded from the tally, as were National Public Radio reporters and public television reporters from local member stations. Guests included in the tally: All other journalists, both reporters and columnists, as well as academics, activists, think tank staffers, etc., save those who discussed non-political subjects or didn’t advance partisan or ideological positions during their interviews.
