PBS. The Public Broadcasting Service. It’s supposed to be a neutral source of information.
According to its (positively written, of course) Wikipedia entry:
PBS is funded by a combination of member station dues, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, pledge drives, and donations from both private foundations and individual citizens. All proposed funding for programming is subject to a set of standards to ensure the program is free of influence from the funding source. PBS has over 350 member television stations, many owned by educational institutions, nonprofit groups both independent or affiliated with one particular local public school district or collegiate educational institution, or entities owned by or related to state government.
In fact, it is so far from being any such thing that, if bias posing as neutrality were funny (it isn’t), this claim would be hilarious.
How biased is PBS? Read the beginning of Clay Waters’ article for newsbusters.org – then use the link to read all the rest of this lengthy, fully referenced commentary – and see for yourself:
Introducing an interview with left-wing author Joshua Green, PBS News Hour co-anchor Geoff Bennett made a rare media admission: “Much has been made of the far right’s strong sway over the GOP and its agenda. But what doesn’t get nearly as much attention is the far left’s influence in the Democratic Party.”
Bennett could be describing his very own News Hour, PBS’s flagship weeknight news program. The “far left” certainly doesn’t gain attention on taxpayer-funded PBS, at least not under that label. PBS was “far” more likely to use hostile ideological terminology to describe right-leaning groups, personalities, or policies.
MRC analysts studied the labels used by anchors, reporters and contributors on the PBS News Hour regarding American politics from June 1, 2023 to November 30, 2024. We did not include PBS News Weekend programs.The difference in labeling was stark.
Key Findings:
■ PBS staff used 162 variations of “far right” labels and only six “far left” labels, an astounding ratio of 27 to 1.
■ PBS staff also used mere “right-wing” and “left-wing” labels at a disparity of 33 to 6. So overall, the labeling disparity was 195 to 12.
Is there a hard right in this country? Yes, of course there is.
And is there a hard left – at present, a far more dominating force in this country than the hard right? Yes, of course there is.
But would you ever know it based on the reporting of supposedly “neutral” PBS? Not in a million years.
Bias like this, however distasteful, is just fine for privately funded enterprises (MSNBC and the New York Times, among many others, immediately come to mind). But that’s not supposed to be the case for publicly funded enterprises like PBS.
When Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office I wonder if he will address this ridiculous disparity – by making sure that the only money funding PBS is from private sources. Publicly-funded entities should not – must not – be footing the bill for what amounts to a daily dollop of one-sided propaganda that would make Pravda green with envy.
We’ll see….
