News Hour

The PBS News Hour, along with the rest of the liberal press, have certainly warmed up to the FBI, America’s chief domestic surveillance organization. Since Donald Trump came on the scene, the press has behaved more like a present-day “Friends of the FBI” – the fundraising group founded by supporters of the infamous J. Edgar Hoover – than the bulwark against government spying and…

The online title to the latest “On Democracy” segment on Monday’s PBS News Hour gave away the slant of the newly hatched series – fear porn to attract liberal viewers during the second Trump Administration: “How the start of Trump’s second term looks like some autocracies”: "President Trump's social media post over the weekend, 'He who saves his country does not violate any law,'…

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…