President Trump marked the 100-day point of his second term by granting interviews to hostile leftist media outlets. On Sunday, President Trump tangled with NBC’s Kristen Welker, after he had verbal combat with ABC’s Terry Moran and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
Four years ago, President Biden granted no interviews, not to hostile networks like Fox and not to his friends in the liberal media. They didn’t care. Once again, Trump is punished for granting broad access to hostile journalists.
On Meet the Press, Kristen Welker began with aggression on the tariff issue. As Trump repeated his lines about girls possibly having too many dolls, Welker made the economy sound terrible: “When you say they could have three dolls instead of 30 dolls, are you saying…Americans see empty store shelves?”
CNN’s Republican analyst Brad Todd argued Trump “has given more interviews in the past five months than Joe Biden gave in four years.” CNN anchor Audie Cornish shot back: “Yeah, well, the thing about giving interviews is then people scrutinize the answers, which is where we are now.”
But can’t we also scrutinize the questions?
One really easy way to know that TV journalists are Democrats is how they rush to defense of PBS and NPR and use all the same arguments that Democrats have made in congressional hearings and social media. They willfully ignore the incessant bias of “public” broadcasting and deflect back to kiddie shows like Sesame Street, as if that’s anything like the political smears in their “news,” comparing Trump to Hitler.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher lied that NPR has no bias, “our people report straight down the line.” This is completely at odds with reality, when NPR reporters have been filing stories about how Trump is an authoritarian. She bizarrely added “we’ve had a whole host of conservative voices on air,” which is what they say when one or two are brought on. She even claimed they’d have more, but the Trump folks “won’t join us.” You suggest they’re budding fascists, and then you act surprised they skip the hostility.
We at MRC would gladly accept an interview request to address the bias of the media, especially in “public” broadcasting.
On PBS, the Friday night News Hour duo freaked out over President Trump’s executive order to defund public TV and radio. Jonathan Capehart bizarrely called it a “fundamental attack on our Constitution,” equating PBS and the First Amendment. Liberal journalists equate themselves with Democracy and with Free Speech, even as they supported Biden keeping opponents off the ballot and backed censorship of troublesome conservative viewpoints on social media. It’s both democracy and freedom of speech when people attack the media. It sounds authoritarian to suggest the media can never be criticized.
David Brooks was more embarrassing: “If you think that PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America — and I shouldn’t be defending us, I get paid by PBS. But I’m going to do it! Who’s more straight down the line than we are? Is it MSNBC? Is it Fox? Is it CNN?”
PBS is like taxpayer-funded MSNBC. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
