The next time you hear the broadcast voice drone, “This is PBS,” imagine him saying, “This is DNC.”
Because if the 2024 convention coverage by the Public Broadcasting Service is a sign of its politics, PBS is firmly in the Democrats‘ pocket.
Apparently unconcerned about GOP efforts to “defund” it of annual taxpayer contributions, PBS went overboard to portray the Democratic National Convention as joyful and the Republican National Convention as a demonstration of racism.
In its study of how PBS covered the conventions, the Media Research Center, the conservative media watchdog, found that 88% of the network’s coverage of the DNC was positive, while 72% of the RNC coverage was negative.
“Hating Republicans, Hailing Democrats,” is how MRC described the biased coverage.
NEW STUDY: @PBS coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88% positive, while coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative.
Your tax dollars are funding this election interference. https://t.co/bBBtdMkwF1
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) September 4, 2024
“The Republican and Democratic conventions are over, and it’s clear which party was the favorite of taxpayer-supported PBS in their nightly three hours of live coverage in prime time. Not even the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump quelled the overwhelming negativity with which the PBS panel greeted the [RNC] in Milwaukee in July,” the report said.
“Yet a month later, Vice President Kamala Harris and a familiar crew of Democratic faces were greeted rapturously by the same network at the [DNC] in Chicago,” it added.
The report by MRC’s public broadcasting analyst, Clay Waters, provided several examples of the lefty bias on display by correspondents and anchors, and he noted that even self-described conservatives dished up love for Democrats.
“There was little political daylight between liberal Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart and ‘conservative’ New York Times columnist David Brooks, both of whom feature on PBS NewsHour’s weekly political showdown of presumably oppositional perspectives. The Brooks-Capehart pair-up perfectly encapsulated tax-funded PBS’s idea of political balance, pitting strong (and sometimes weepy) liberal Capehart versus slightly more centrist Brooks,” Waters wrote.
Of their commentary on the RNC, Waters found that Capehart was 91% negative to 9% positive and Brooks 67% negative to 33% positive.
By comparison, Capehart’s comments on the DNC were 2% negative to 98% positive, and Brooks was 38% negative to 62% positive.
The PBS correspondents weren’t much better with questions evaluated by Waters being mostly hostile to Republicans and friendly to Democrats.
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Ditto for the hosts. At the RNC, co-anchor Amna Nawaz said, “We have seen, though, we should note, Republican rhetoric veer into outright racism, echoing some white supremacist notions as well.”
But at the DNC, the description of the event was different. “Laura Barron-Lopez opened PBS’s Night Two coverage with a pro-Democratic trope already becoming tedious: ‘[Delegates] really think that Kamala Harris should embrace who she is, and one of her signature personality traits is that she often likes to laugh and bring joy to what she’s doing, and that’s something that a lot of delegates have talked to me about tonight.’”
