In its coverage of the two major party conventions, Public Broadcasting Service had favorable coverage of the Democrats in Chicago 88 percent of the time. It reported negatively 72 percent of the time from the GOP convention in Milwaukee. Tim Graham of Media Research Center had one of his analysts look at all the coverage from both conventions because it was too tedious and wearisome to do it himself.
“They were remarkably negative about the Republican convention all the way through. They were very, very positive talking about the hope and the vibes and the joy at the Democrat convention,” Graham said.
Dems dominate staff
MRC's Clay Waters actually compiled the report. Graham says the convention coverage mirrors the politics of the PBS staff.
Taxpayers – even Republican ones – shell out a lot of money for PBS. According to the PBS website, 39% of its funding comes from federal, state and local governments, plus public universities.
“(Waters) looked at DC voter registrations and found 88 Democrats that worked at NPR and zero Republicans. Why are Republicans paying for something that's dedicated to savaging them?” Graham asked.
PBS was founded in 1969 to promote and encourage diverse, non-commercial, educational programming. But now with multiple news channels and an entire internet to push educational media, has its time passed?
“The rationale for public TV has been gone for a long time now, you know, really from the time that CNN came on the scene to do the news 24/7,” Graham said.
There have been efforts to strip PBS and its radio cousin NPR of their taxpayer funds, but so far that hasn’t happened.
“Well, there has been movement in Congress, certainly in the House, where there have been new bills introduced to try to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after all of this time,” Graham said.
