In the aftermath of defunding, PBS stations like WETA in Washington DC are sending out fundraising letters with the slogan "Defunded, not defeated." PBS CEO Paula Kerger made an appearance on the podcast To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes, and she was still lying to the public about the liberal bias of PBS, which we have repeatedly proven in our studies.
Sykes asked Kerger if PBS was unfairly lumped in with NPR, as if one was guilty of bias and the other wasn't. On April 14, the White House issued a press release headlined "The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long." Kerger claimed the PBS examples of bias didn't really count, because they were made by taxpayer-funded PBS stations, not taxpayer-funded PBS.
They aired on hundreds of affiliates across America on taxpayer-funded PBS! But somehow this wasn't real bias:
PAULA KERGER: There was a, the press release that that came out of the White House that had a series of facts of why we were biased media -- because that's how we were we were labeled in the executive order and most of them were public radio, but there were a few public television you know examples thrown in. Ironically, most of the references on the public television side, I can't comment on the radio side, but most of them were actually not PBS programs. There were programs that had come from our stations.
This itself is false, because Trump listed three of our studies of PBS News content:
- In 2023, a study found that congressional Republicans saw 85% negative coverage while congressional Democrats saw 54% positive coverage on PBS’s flagship news program.
- According to a 2024 study, PBS news staff used 162 variations of the term “far-right,” but only six variations of “far-left.”
- A 2024 Media Research Center study found that PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative, while coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88% positive.
Kerger recalled the March 26 House DOGE committee hearing chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and bizarrely claimed “We're not a news organization so we are in slightly different position than [NPR] radio, which is you know largely news they also do music of course but um you know why we have ended up in the place that we are right now is really fully difficult to understand.”
It's not difficult to understand. Trump's listing of bias also included our report on Washington Week With The Atlantic boasting in 2023, that Joe Biden was "mentally quite acute." That's produced by DC station WETA and airs all over the country, and PBS identifies it as a "news" program.
The Independent Lens series airs on PBS stations through the federally-funded Independent Television Service (ITVS), and Trump noted in 2017, they aired the documentary Real Boy, about a girl who wants to fake being a boy.
Trump noted an exploration of reparations for slavery, which was independently produced by something called "World Channel," but it's there for viewing on the PBS streaming service.
The same goes for a panel discussion devoted to what it “mean[s] to be woke” and “white privilege” and how to move beyond awareness to action. The show A Seat at the Table is produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting.
It's like claiming an article on NewsBusters not written by staff -- say, a syndicated column by Larry Elder or John Stossel -- is somehow not a NewsBusters article, although it was an article published on NewsBusters for everyone to read.