PBS and NPR each faced the difficulty on Wednesday night of covering their own bosses taking tough questions from Republicans at the Capitol in a hearing on Wednesday. PBS actually aired a Republican citing us -- just as a "conservative media watchdog group." NPR didn't want to seriously engage in anything.
PBS correspondent William Brangham included plenty of Republican and Democrat soundbites from the hearing. He also aired PBS boss Paula Kerger claiming that the drag queen singing to children "The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish" were never broadcast on TV. Subcommittee chairman challenged that, saying WNET in New York aired it on April 20, 2021. The video is available across the country at the PBS website.
Here's where the studies on PBS tilt were mentioned:
Rep. PAT FALLON (R-TX): Propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The PBS News Hour was criticized as well. Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas, cited a conservative media watchdog group that says it analyzed the News Hour's coverage of the 2024 presidential conventions.
FALLON: Seventy-two percent of the coverage of the GOP convention was negative; 88 percent of the coverage of Democratic Convention was positive.
Rep. ROBERT GARCIA (D-CA): A large majority of Americans say they trust PBS. And that's exactly why extremists are trying to tear it down.
As usual, Brangham claimed their funding was a tiny percentage of the enormous federal budget, and cost about $1.50 a day per American...as if the issue was merely fiscal, and not about all their horrendous daily "news" product.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik always arrives with the disclaimer that no NPR executive has reviewed his copy, but it still sounds like tinny self-defense. Online, he huffed:
The hearing, entitled "Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable," appears arranged more to score points than to find facts.
He's not looking in the mirror to see if this applies to NPR "news." Worse, he claimed the hearing represented the "anti-press posture" of Republicans. Folkenflik routinely writes negative stories about Fox News -- is that an "anti-press posture"? Liberals think only the liberal media is real journalism, even when their news is fake.
On All Things Considered, Folkenflik didn't really feature the bosses responding to aggressive Republican questions about bias -- denying it exists. There was 20 seconds of Rep. William Timmons pressing on former NPR editor Uri Berliner's research on the party registrations in D.C. of NPR journalists -- 87 registered Democrats, zero Republicans. But Folkenflik said NPR has "many hundreds of journalists," so those numbers NPR "doesn't necessarily affirm." See? Doesn't that sound like it was whitewashed by executives?
Folkenflik vaguely noted Maher "yielded ground" on "how the network responded to the Hunter Biden laptop story," but didn't explain they dismissed it as a "pure distraction."
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