PBS

On the PBS show Washington Week with The Atlantic on February 7, host Jeffrey Goldberg began: “Elon Musk, the unelected, unconfirmed, unofficial, but extremely powerful prime minister of the United States, is carrying out his plan to purge thousands of employees from the federal government.”

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’s regular Monday political conclave with Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter and NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith ran hotter than usual, with concerns about President Trump’s purported assault on the First Amendment fanning the fear flames, leading the panel to make ridiculous defenses of the non-partisan (!) Associated Press.

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.

Amanpour & Co. was guest hosted on Tuesday by Paula Newton, last seen here in January fretting over the disturbing coincidence of Martin Luther King Jr. Day coinciding with the inauguration of Donald Trump. Tuesday she was talking to the architect of Obamacare to warn about the Trump Administration’s “drastic cuts” to the National Institute of Health, part of the cost-cutting…

On Tuesday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, a panel hosted by Stephanie Ruhle expressed their regret, dismay, and indignation at the implosion of public confidence in established, mainstream media outlets, such as their own. In typical fashion for them, they pinned all the blame on such favorite bogeymen as President Trump and Elon Musk, and showed no self-awareness of the…

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…

The results of the Worst Media Take of the Week are in and the winner is….

Over the weekend, NPR White House reporter Asma Khalid appeared on PBS, NPR, and ABC hammering away at Elon Musk as "the world's richest man" taking a hatchet to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is automatically associated with the poor, so Musk will "increase starvation rates." He's a killer.