If ever you find yourself questioning whether the government was right to stop funding PBS, just take an evening to watch. The network is untiringly reminding us all that the answer is “yes.”
PBS ran a NewsHour segment last week, packaged as straight reporting, that asked no serious questions and offered no serious exploration of its subject. Instead, it indulged a style of reporting in which the complexities and details of contentious debates are sidestepped in favor of an arrogant appeal to a supposed consensus. Although PBS is not alone in embracing this style of news coverage, its arts reporting last week was as pure a distillation of the format as I have seen.
Reporting from Minnesota, PBS alerted viewers first to the “tougher economic pressures” facing “smaller arts organizations.” What “tougher economic pressures” exactly? Who can say. The segment never specifies, but this appears to be vaguely associated with Trump administration budget cuts.
“For many,” begins senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown, “coming together has never felt so urgent, so necessary here in the Twin Cities. Waves of trauma from the murder of George Floyd to the COVID-19 pandemic to the recent ICE surge that left Renee Good and Alex Pretti dead have rocked the region over the last six years.”
He adds, “Small community groups … have been on the front lines, getting out of the studio and into the streets, even in the freezing cold.”
“We show up with our drums, and then it just amplifies the feeling,” says TaikoArts executive director Jennifer Weir. “It’s like getting plugged into a collective energy source. I have never experienced anything like it.”
What, exactly, are they protesting in the “freezing cold,” and why? We receive no explanation as Brown moves on to the next subject of the profile, the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, a “local arts group” that “has also been in the thick of it. … A group of writers was recently commissioned to chronicle events during the ICE surge in a series of monologues.”
The theater’s director, Mark Valdez, explains that the company is “doing what’s right” through theatre. “A lot of the work that we have been doing is around rapid response,” Valdez said. “We are foremost a social justice organization, secondarily a theater company. We use the tools of theater. We use the tools of creativity of art making to disrupt injustice, to build community, to advance racial equity.”
Among the offerings provided by this social-justice organization that doubles as an arts group are “Say Your Rights Out Loud” legal training sessions. The group also raises funds for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
“We invited people to come in,” Valdez said. “We hired actors to play the parts of ICE agents, and participants came in and would just practice saying their rights out loud just to prepare themselves for —”
Brown interrupts: “So a kind of rehearsal or a kind of performance, but with real consequences.”
“With real consequences, yeah,” Valdez responds.
Without a whiff of irony or self-awareness, the PBS program then switches to bemoaning the decline in both private and public funding for self-described arts groups that offer legal training and role-playing to activists working against immigration enforcement. The segment takes particular offense at the “recent cuts” and “pushback” from the Trump administration. What recent cuts? What pushback? PBS never explains. There is certainly no awareness that a lot of people who saw the segment were probably wondering to themselves, “Why were we ever funding this in the first place?”
The segment ends with Brown beating a protest drum and describing the experience as “exhilarating, exhausting, the kinds of emotions.” Yes, in a segment packaged as straight news reporting, Brown joined an actual drum circle.
It is not just that the coverage is overtly sympathetic to left-wing activism — that is already typical in legacy news media. It is that PBS made no effort at actual journalism. It made no effort to analyze or explore its chosen subjects. Instead, it presented professional left-wing agitation as some kind of uncontroversial and newly trendy activity that people are trying out, like base-jumping or soccer.
Not even a thought was given to the fact that many of the subjects’ views are quite extreme or at least hotly debated — that people (including, perhaps, some PBS viewers) hold opposing opinions on illegal or legal immigration and law enforcement.
At no point did the program explain why self-described professional activists should be entitled to taxpayer funding from programs that Trump has supposedly cut. Viewers learned nothing from this piece. It was a disservice, just as it was a disservice when members of the press argued that sometimes there are not two sides to every story. It is pure arrogance by people who often treat criticism of their professionalism as if it were an assault on democracy itself.
When it comes to activist groups like the ones in the Twin Cities, PBS tells us only that they are good and that they need more money. At this point, we’re not even talking about bias in journalism. We are talking about a political ad.
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.
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