Washington Week with The Atlantic, public television’s taxpayer-funded weekly political roundtable featuring a rotating stable of journalists, touts itself as "objective.”
But a review of the last three months of Washington Week (April 4, 2025 – June 27, 2025) proved Trump-phobic liberalism still reigns over the public airwaves. While unemployment is falling, inflation is down, illegal border crossings are plummeting under Trump, and the president dealing successfully with Iran’s nuclear threat, little of that positive news penetrated the tax-funded liberal bubble.
Key Findings:
■ The panelists spent 83 minutes opining on Republicans, focusing on Trump and his administration, in 93% negative fashion (77 minutes positive, six minutes negative).
■ Show “intros” by moderator Jeffrey Goldberg often set a mocking anti-Trump tone, not the “civil discourse” promised.
■ Of the 14 different media outlets that were represented on Washington Week during the study period, representing, all but one hailed from the left end of the political spectrum – and that single one (The Dispatch) sounded as liberal as the rest.
Our previous Washington Week study from March 2024 found coverage fixated on the upcoming elections, and also included Trump’s courtroom controversies and leadership strife in the Republican-controlled Congress. Back then, coverage ran 90% negative against the Republican Party and Trump.
This time around, even with supposedly bipartisan foreign policy issues on the table like Iran, the coverage only became more slanted, at 93% negative.
Top Five Most-Discussed Republican Issues
Trump’s Tariffs: 730 total seconds, 664 seconds negative, 66 seconds positive, 91% negative coverage
Donald Trump in General*: 659 total seconds, 587 seconds negative, 72 seconds positive: 89% negative coverage
Trump’s Immigration Policy (including judiciary conflict): 468 total seconds, 468 seconds negative, 0 seconds positive: 100% negative coverage
Trump’s Foreign Policy in General (excluding Israel/Iran and Russia/Ukraine): 463 total seconds, 428 seconds negative, 35 seconds positive: 92.4% negative coverage
Republicans in Congress: 297 total seconds, 297 seconds negative, 0 seconds positive: 100% negative coverage
* Coverage of Trump without ties to a specific, current political issue; for example, Trump reacting to the new pope, his social media postings about journalists, or a look back at his first 100 days in office
Worth a mention is the #6 item on the list, Trump and Iran. Despite Trump’s success in ordering a successful strike on Iran’s dangerous bomb program after weeks of diplomacy, Washington Week coverage was resoundingly negative, both before and after the successful strike on the Fordow nuclear site: 292 total seconds, 239 seconds negative, 53 seconds positive: 82% negative coverage
Top Five Most-Discussed Democratic Issues
In contrast, there were only trace mentions of the Democratic Party over the study period, always within broader Trump-related discussions -- outside the special episode devoted wholly to the Biden campaign expose book Original Sin on the coverup of President Joe Biden’s decline into decrepitude.
Here’s how Washington Week panelists treated the top five most-discussed Democratic political personalities/groups over the three-month study period:
The Biden White House: 565 total seconds, 0 seconds positive, 565 seconds negative, 100% negative
The Biden Debate Fiasco: 174 total seconds, 0 seconds positive, 174 seconds negative, 100% negative
President Biden himself: 118 total seconds, 7 seconds positive, 111 seconds negative, 94% negative
Kamala Harris: 46 total seconds, 0 seconds positive, 46 seconds negative, 100% negative
Democrats in Congress: 42 total seconds, 0 seconds positive, 42 seconds negative, 100% negative
Virtually all Democratic coverage came from the May 23 special episode on the Biden campaign expose Original Sin. Remove that episode, and the Democrats received a piddling 61 seconds of “coverage” (18 seconds negative, 43 seconds positive), which consisted of fleeting mentions within Trump-related stories.
GOLDBERG’S SPICY SET-UPS
Upon taking up the show’s moderator reins in August 2023, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, bragged that the renamed Washington Week with The Atlantic was “a space for civil and extended conversation about the issues affecting the news and our world.” But that promised civility has yet to transpire under his supervision as host.
Goldberg raised his own profile across PBS on the March 28, 2025 Washington Week episode (outside this study’s parameter) mocking the administration while talking about how he had been accidentally added to a White House encrypted group chat on the Signal phone app where administration officials discussed bombing the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
Goldberg also made himself the center of attention with his loaded introductions to the weekly panels, setting anti-Trump tones from the start. Here’s a sampling of his conversation starters:
April 4: “Financial markets have tanked as angry allies and adversaries alike retaliate against America after President Trump announces drastic new tariffs.”
April 11: “Like all of you, I'm trying to figure out if there's a method to the seeming [tariff] madness we've all experienced this past week. This is the kind of week in which you shouldn't, among other things, look at your 401(k) too closely. I did, mistake.”
May 30: “Most presidents wait until they leave the White House to cash in. President Trump takes a different approach. Crypto deals, hotels, golf courses, 747s, everything is on the table. If there's a way to make money off the presidency, he's on it. Tonight, we'll talk about all the ways Trump is treating the White House and Mar-a-Lago as places to help make him richer than he already is, next.”
June 6: “….at home, the rule of law is in real danger, next.”
“Civil” conversation?
Who’s Talking?
Goldberg moderated 11 of the 13 weekly episodes included in the study, with reporters Laura Barron-Lopez of PBS News Hour and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic guest moderating one episode each.
In all, 29 individual panelists (including moderator Goldberg) landed on Washington Week during the study period, some making multiple appearances. They represented 14 different media outlets, mostly legacy media, all but one (The Dispatch) reliably parked on the left end of the spectrum.
The New York Times led the pack with appearances by six different reporters, and staff from Goldberg’s Atlantic had five different appearances (Goldberg himself counting as a single appearance).
In the abstract, the increased presence on the roundtable of journalist Stephen Hayes of the center-right anti-Trump outlet The Dispatch was a small step toward balance. Hayes made four appearances over the 13 episodes; however, Hayes’s contributions were in line with those from the legacy media outlets, matching their harsh anti-Trump tone. On April 25 he lamented of Trump’s foreign policy, “the ethos is, sadly, we are the bully and we're unapologetic about it.”
Tied with Hayes at four appearances was Nancy Youssef, representing the Wall Street Journal (but recently poached by Goldberg to write for The Atlantic). White House reporter Peter Baker of the New York Times, Ashley Parker of The Atlantic, and David Ignatius, foreign policy columnist of the Washington Post, made three appearances each.
On an ironic note, Eugene Daniels, MSNBC reporter and head of the White House Correspondents’ Association, accused the White House on April 18 of “frankly, lying” that the WHCA had not brought in new organizations to cover the White House, bragging the WHCA had brought in, among others “The Daily Caller, right, Christian Broadcast News, all these different types of organizations….”
Yet unlike Daniels’ employer MSNBC, The Daily Caller never appears on the Washington Week panel. Neither do staffers from Fox News, The Washington Times, Washington Examiner, or Washington Free Beacon.
What they Said: Trump Administration Has "Repeatedly Emboldened Extremists"
Moderator Goldberg was far from the only harsh critic of Trump and his administration on Washington Week. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl made an over-the-top prediction in an April11 discussion of Trump’s back and forth on tariff threats as “actually threatening us with not just a bad stock market but with a potential economic meltdown.”
Reacting to liberal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska expressing fear of Trumpian attacks, PBS News Hour White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez ranted on April 18: “….this shouldn't really be a surprise to her or to others that Republicans are in this situation because the administration, even before Trump took office, have repeatedly emboldened extremists and used hate speech to talk about their political enemies.” Later she said: “And normalizing the populace to political violence is a trait of authoritarianism.”
Following some vague hints of trouble at The Pentagon from NPR’s Asma Khalid, Goldberg gave some unsolicited advice to Trump on the April 25 show: “Why doesn’t he fire [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth?”
On May 9, Susan Glasser of The New Yorker magazine complained of backlash about the new American pope from “very conservative, very right-wing Catholics in the United States.”
Veteran NBC News reporter Andrew Mitchell said on May 16 that in Trump’s Washington, “The real game-changer is the level of open corruption.”
Even in the otherwise laudable May 23 episode wholly devoted to talking to the authors of Original Sin, Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, Goldberg and Tapper made unwarranted excuses for the media’s passive coverage. Not mentioned: Goldberg himself in a 2023 Washington Week episode insisted of the obviously declining Biden, “Mentally, he’s quite acute.”
On May 30, Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck faulted Trump’s popular move against Harvard University, saying, “this just seems pretty extreme for people who want immigration crackdown and want lower costs.”
During another special episode on June 6 featuring a single panelist, veteran New York Times foreign affairs correspondent Thomas Friedman, afte0r Friedman pondered what would happen if Democrats took power and started acting like Trump, Goldberg set him up.
Thomas Friedman: And if that happens, we're really off to the races, then the whole thing just starts to disappear.
Goldberg: What country does that remind you of, that condition?
Friedman: You know, I mean so many dictatorships just in general that I've covered over the years….”
Praise for Trump on Washington Week came in fleeting spurts. Goldberg gave the president credit on May 9 for praising the new American-born pope on social media (“the president was very kind about the new pope”) while Friedman on June 6 ironically admitted Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy in the Middle East might not be all bad ("Some things are also true even if Donald Trump believes them….his transactionalism sometimes can also be an advantage. For instance, I'm glad he's sitting down with the Iranians”).
CONCLUSION:
The publicly funded Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that airs Washington Week with The Atlantic was launched in 1969 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was born with a congressional mandate to maintain "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Yet judging by our findings from the early days of the second Trump Administration, the tax-funded Washington Week with the Atlantic continues to grossly betray its mandate to the American taxpayer to provide ideological balance.
METHODOLOGY:
We tallied all explicitly evaluative comments from Washington Week with The Atlantic panelists (e.g., colorful, mocking, flattering, and ideologically loaded descriptions) regarding Democrats or Republicans. Straightforward descriptions, explanations, and analysis were not included.
The top five areas of discussion involving each party were then ranked based on the total amount of time in which they were positively or negatively evaluated, along with a percentage figure documenting the resulting spin, whether positive or negative.
We also counted and sorted the media affiliation of the panelists.