PBS partisans treat Ken Burns as if he was one of America’s finest treasures. In reality, he should be nobody’s idea of a nonpartisan historical filmmaker. He’s a fervent liberal Democrat. When Donald Trump first won in 2016, Burns admitted “I too needed some time in the fetal position, covers pulled up to my chin.” He represents the liberal bubble at PBS.
In 2024, according to Open Secrets, he donated $18,400 to the Democratic National Committee, $10,000 to the Democratic Party of Montana, and the maximum federal donation of $3,300 to Kamala Harris, Sen Jon Tester (D-Montana), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and the congressional campaign of CNN analyst John Avlon in New York. In 2020, he donated $2,800 to socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On Sunday's Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.
JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?
KEN BURNS: Of course I am. And I've always been worried about it. In the 1990s, I think I testified in the House or the Senate, in appropriations or authorization about the endowments are about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.
JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.
KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It's a bottom up. It's the largest network in the country. There's 330 stations. It mostly serves, and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted, it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only they get. [???] They also have not only our good children's and primetime stuff, they have Classroom of the Air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather, emergency information. That we're going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing when this is the place that for 32 years gave William F. Buckley a show. And it's – I mean it's – and it's - - that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative.
This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn't have any balance.
It's especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is "moderated by a conservative" when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.
But that's not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to "CBS fact-checking in real time"?
Burns then proclaimed that he could go to any cable or streaming service and they would fall at his feet to air his films, but he needs ten years to finish a project, so he loves PBS. "And that has been under the system that has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out. Kind of like the national parks, or the Declaration of Independence, applied to the landscape. These are really good, American institutions that represent everybody from the bottom up, which is what it's always about. That's the essence of what Thomas Jefferson was talking about."
PBS doesn't represent everybody. It was created by liberal Democrats in 1967 to serve liberal Democrats with taxpayer money. To compare state-funded broadcasting to the Declaration of Independence is the worst kind of ideological flatulence.
PS: The footage CBS showed of Burns testifying to Congress about PBS in 1999 is the same hearing where I sat at the other end of the table to explain the dramatic liberal and partisan bias of PBS. His testimony that day was so arrogant and self-centered it became another reason for me to keep exposing the overall liberal arrogance of "public" broadcasting. It's too bad CBS can't challenge Burns with our conservative evidence from either then or now.
