The PBS News Hour, along with the rest of the liberal press, have certainly warmed up in recent years to the FBI, America’s chief domestic surveillance organization. Since Donald Trump came on the scene, a press eager to find criminal behavior within a loathed administration has behaved more like a present-day “Friends of the FBI” than the bulwark against government spying and surveillance it once fancied itself as being.
PBS has even run pro-FBI stories with a McCarthyite tinge, like one applauding the online liberal “sedition hunters” of January 6 scofflaws.
But the release from prison of an American Indian activist convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 put the PBS News Hour in liberal reset mode on Tuesday evening. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz marked the occasion with a tone similar to hard-left groups like Amnesty International in celebrating the release of the infamous convicted killer Leonard Peltier. The now-80-year-old Peltier’s life sentence was commuted to home confinement by President Biden just hours before leaving office January 20.
FBI director Christopher Wray, whose words are usually taken seriously by the media, issued strong criticism of the commutation at the time, calling Peltier a “remorseless killer” and writing, “Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”
But never mind that. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz devoted 55 seconds of the show’s Tuesday news wrap to portraying Peltier through a throwback leftist prism of resistance to supposed government tyranny. There was no dissent allowed to the view that Peltier was a "symbol for human rights."
Amna Nawaz : ….Native American activist Leonard Peltier was released from prison today after former President Joe Biden commuted his life sentence. Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975, and the agency has long opposed his commutation. The 80-year-old has always maintained his innocence, and Native Americans widely believe he was a political prisoner. Peltier left a federal prison in Florida today and is heading back to his reservation in North Dakota to live under home confinement. His supporters described him as a global symbol for human rights.
Tracker Gina Marie Rangel Quinones, Supporter of Leonard Peltier: His incarceration represented not only other political prisoners, but people who stand for -- in solidarity for all humankind and humanity.
Nawaz: In a statement, Peltier said -- quote -- "Today, I am finally free. They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit."
So much for PBS’s congressional mandate to maintain “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”
This one-sided segment was brought to you in part by BDO.
