OPINION: PBS has forfeited public funding with its consistent biases

As someone who grew up with PBS, it somewhat pains me to write this column. The launch of “Sesame Street” in 1969 was my window to the world as a 3-year-old in the six-TV station Chicago media market, and Bert and Ernie were the talk of my kindergarten class.

A lot has changed since then. Last week, “Sesame Street” featured a trans hairstylist in a monster makeover segment that congressional Republicans say wreaks of child grooming. It was pretty brazen for a children’s show whose public funding hangs in the balance in the One Big Beautiful budget reconciliation bill now before the U.S. Senate.

We often watched PBS documentaries in school, such as cool documentaries about sea life, like an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” Not every PBS documentary about the Earth in those days warned of the cataclysmic and catastrophic consequences of the climate change calamity. They weren’t doomsday at all. Instead, they were fun and educational.

As a third-grader, I began watching “The Robert MacNeil Report,” later renamed “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” getting my daily dose of in-depth news coverage and analysis. Jim Lehrer was considered such an unbiased news anchor he was often chosen as a presidential debate moderator.

I still tune in to the “PBS NewsHour,” as nauseating as the daily liberal bias has become. Recently, the show hosted a law professor lambasting President Donald Trump for accepting a jet from Qatar as if he were the plane’s personal owner, and a representative from Human Rights Watch who repeated mainstream media assertions that there is nothing wrong going on with the Afrikaners in South Africa. There was no balance, no competing viewpoint, just the same ole “there’s no there, there” assertions of the other TV networks.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, a regular on the “PBS NewsHour,” recently compared Elon Musk’s time at the Department of Government Efficiency to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. And Brooks is considered the program’s conservative commentator.

PBS’ weekly political show, “The McLaughlin Group,” was must-watch TV for news junkies from 1982 to 2016. John McLaughlin and a balanced panel of pundits duked it out discussing politics in a free-wielding round table in which all viewpoints were expressed. That kind of balance is gone from publicly funded programming today. Uri Berliner, a former senior business editor for PBS’s radio cousin NPR, revealed in April 2024 he had examined voter registration records for his D.C. newsroom and found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions with zero Republicans. When he presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting, Berliner wrote he was met by “profound indifference.”

PBS state affiliates also receive public funding to produce their own programming, and most states produce a weekly news analysis program. Ours, “New Mexico in Focus,” is the most biased I’ve seen across several states. If you want to hear about nuclear colonialism, pueblo feminism, the barriers the homeless face, or the threats Trump poses to the environment, native cultures and our judicial system, the program is for you.

But no one else watches it. When I ask people if they saw a recent episode no one has but myself. That’s because the show makes no effort at presenting a balanced discussion. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Republican on “New Mexico in Focus,” but I sure can recall long interviews of former New Mexico ACLU executive director Peter Simonson saying his organization has taken on social justice causes, Archbishop of Santa Fe John Wester calling for “comprehensive immigration reform,” and Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium asserting transgenerational disease from radiation exposure with no pushback from the show’s host.

I take no joy is saying it, but it’s time for Big Bird and the rest of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to leave the nest and make it on their own, just like news organizations do that receive no public funding. The $1.1 billion in savings over two years can be put to better use for children and adults by retiring some U.S. debt.