BROADCAST BIAS: NPR, PBS bosses defend outlandish spin, ABC, NBC, CBS have a crazy reaction
On Wednesday, the House DOGE subcommittee held a hearing to hold "public" broadcasting accountable for not serving the entire public that helps pay their bills. Under a barrage of Republican questions, NPR CEO Katherine Maher admitted it was a "mistake" for NPR to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story, expressed regret about vicious anti-Trump tweets before she came to NPR, and agreed it wouid be disturbing if reports were true that there were no Republicans in NPR newsroom.
How much coverage did this rock’em-sock’em hearing receive on ABC, CBS, and NBC? Nothing. Zero. Not on the evening news. Not on the morning programs the day after.
It’s not like the broadcast networks weren’t covering hearings. They all led their newscasts with "Signalgate," the Trump administration discussing a military strike on the Houthis on the private encrypted app Signal, but letting in leftist journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Goldberg is the host of the weekly PBS show "Washington Week with the Atlantic."
NPR, PBS HONCHOS FACE TENSE GRILLING BY GOP LAWMAKERS OVER BIASED COVERAGE, TAXPAYER FUNDING
Both ABC’s "World News Tonight" and the "NBC Nightly News" ran footage of CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard being grilled by Democrats in a House hearing about how this breach happened. "Bombshell text" was the hype from NBC anchor Lester Holt’s opening of the broadcast.
On the "CBS Evening News," reporter Ed O’Keefe was gunning for resignations: "Well, here at the White House tonight, officials cannot rule out that someone might lose their job over all of this." He interviewed Goldberg and former Obama Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to play up the scandal.
O’Keefe ended by noting the bipartisan call from the Senate Armed Services Committee for a full investigation: "Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman from Mississippi, called it a successful attack on the Houthis but ‘a shame this security question is distracting the public from the success of that mission.’"
It’s a "shame," all right. The networks will always downplay any Trump success and play up any Trump mistake.
So let’s explore the news from the PBS-NPR hearing they didn’t want to report:
1. NPR CEO Katharine Maher made a very belated admission to GOP questions about their harsh dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop story as a "pure distraction" right before the 2020 election: "Our current editorial leadership thinks that was a mistake, as do I." This was breaking news, because no one heard them admit that before now, when their taxpayer cash is on the line.
2. Maher confessed that she would not send the same wild tweets she put out calling Trump a "deranged racist sociopath" and saying America was "addicted to white supremacy." She called looting "counterproductive," but it’s "hard to be mad" about property crimes. She claimed she has "evolved" from these views. But these hot takes neatly match NPR’s wokeness. They probably helped her get the gig.
3. Both President and CEO of PBS Paula Kerger and Maher proclaimed against all the evidence that PBS and NPR news programs are nonpartisan and unbiased. Texas Republican Rep. Pat Fallon cited NewsBusters studies, like one that found the "News Hour" used 162 labels of "far-right" extremism and only six uses of ‘far left" terms. Another one found PBS coverage of the 2024 party conventions was dramatically biased – the Republican confab drew 72 percent negative coverage, while the Democrat event drew 88 percent positive coverage. Kerger professed she had no idea about these studies. So much for preparing for the hearing.
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4. Several Republicans cited the expose of NPR senior editor Uri Berliner, who found in research on the D.C. voter registrations of NPR newsroom employees that there were 87 Democrats and zero Republicans. Maher replied that would be disturbing if it were true, but in a year on the job, there’s no sign that they've hired any Republicans who could affect the daily leftist intensity of the NPR "news." Berliner was not a Republican, and he was forced out.
5. Four Republicans noted Berliner’s finding that Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff was interviewed 25 times on NPR during the Russian-collusion fake news [I’d add here that Wolfson and Rutz found 32, but that’s your call.] Rep. Fallon noted that and asked Maher how many times the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, had been interviewed about his Biden impeachment probe. Maher didn’t know. Fallon told her it was zero. There’s a similar lack of attention to Comer from the network Sunday shows.
Hearing bias has been a constant exhibit in broadcast-news bias going back 50 years. They went wall-to-wall for the Democrats on Watergate, Iran-Contra, Anita Hill, and the extremely one-sided House January 6 Committee. Hearings chaired by Republicans are buried as worthless partisan exercises.
PBS and NPR felt compelled to cover this DOGE hearing, but that doesn’t mean they liked it. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik lamented it this way: "The hearing, entitled ‘Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,’ appears arranged more to score points than to find facts."
The broadcast news networks are easily accused of being more interested in scoring points than finding facts. They typically skip all the facts that ruin their "storytelling" – especially facts about how they skew the news.