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PBS CEO and president Paula Kerger claimed Wednesday that she doesn’t see any evidence behind the accusations that her outlet is partial to liberal viewpoints.
Kerger’s comments come as the U.S. Senate is set to vote on President Donald Trump’s rescission bill, a piece of legislation that would cut just over $1 billion in federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the government-backed funding arm for NPR and PBS.
Trump and Republicans have made the case for the cuts, saying they are scraping back funding for “woke” programs that do little more than gird the government’s spending addiction.
“When I look at the range of our programmings on public broadcasting, I can‘t make any sense of an argument that we are somehow biased in any way,” Kerger told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez.
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Sanchez cited the Trump administration stating that PBS publishes “radical woke propaganda disguised as news,” and asked Kerger to respond.
“I don‘t think that Daniel Tiger‘s Neighborhood is a biased program,” she replied, providing an example of PBS children’s programming. It teaches children basic skills around letters and numbers.”
GOP lawmakers have pointed to examples of PBS children’s programming showing evidence of left-wing bias.
Rep. Mary Miller, D-Ill., called out PBS program Sesame Street for promoting Pride Month this June in an X post, as the show has done in the past.
She shared the post, and commented, “PBS is shamelessly grooming our children while collecting taxpayer dollars. This is evil and should infuriate every parent in America. DEFUND!!”
“Federal funds aren’t for grooming. Through Sesame Street characters or otherwise. Defund PBS,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted to his personal X account last month in reply to a video of a 2020 episode of “The Not-Too-Late Show” with Sesame Street character Elmo featuring Johnathan Van Ness of Netflix’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
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“The news programming that we do represents about 10% of our broadcast schedule, and that includes the [PBS] ‘NewsHour,’ of which I‘m very proud of the excellence of the journalism of that series,” Kerger continued.
She claimed that she often asks people for examples of liberal bias in PBS programming, but they have trouble presenting her with any.
“People often struggle to come up with examples of what really they‘re talking about,” she said, adding, “So, we‘re always interested, obviously, in making sure that we‘re serving a multiplicity of viewpoints.”
PBS has been heavily criticized for political bias and for advancing leftist ideologies like gender ideology, such as a PBS movie called “Real Boy,” which, according to PBS, follows a transgender-identifying teen as he “navigates adolescence, sobriety, and physical and emotional ramifications of his changing gender identity.” A “PBS Newshour” segment on promoted transgender treatments for children such as puberty blockers while shrugging off Republican criticisms.
“PBS NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff apologized in August for her “mistake” in reporting that President Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas until after the 2024 presidential election to benefit him politically.
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During an interview with journalist Katie Couric in May, Kerger denied seeing any bias to one side in her network’s programming.
“You know, I get as many calls from people on the more progressive side as on the conservative side that have issues every night with every night’s broadcast. You know, I see this or I see that,” she said.
Kerger also suggested that viewers who complain are the ones seeing red when they see a narrative they don’t like.
“We’re in a difficult time right now in our country around news coverage where people forget that news is news, and it is not about hearing information that is reaffirming what you think you know,” she told Couric.
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