Elmo and Elon Musk Are Cited as G.O.P. Lawmakers Grill PBS and NPR
The New York Times
Dark pronouncements by Republicans about a “communist agenda” espoused by public media were intercut with lighter references to “Sesame Street” and “Curious George.”
Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American Airwaves” — opened her remarks by deriding PBS and NPR as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.
The leaders of both PBS and NPR testified that those claims were untrue, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans, even as the NPR chief executive acknowledged regrets for posting critical remarks about President Trump before she joined the broadcaster.
Democratic committee members mocked the proceedings as a cynical excuse by Republicans to air a familiar list of grievances against the news media. Several Democrats tried to shift focus to the Trump administration, citing the revelation that top security officials inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic on a group chat planning a military operation.
Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that Republican lawmakers would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.
The hearing, organized by a new congressional subcommittee, Delivering on Government Efficiency, represented another front in an extraordinary two months of unrelenting attacks on the news media led by the Trump administration and its allies.
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