By Nathan Gay. Media: DailyWire.com
A new study released Tuesday found that the taxpayer-funded PBS program “Washington Week with The Atlantic” consistently exhibited a staggering 93% negative bias against Republicans and the Trump administration over the past three months, despite claiming to provide “objective” political coverage.
The study, conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC), analyzed 13 weekly episodes from April through June 2025, finding that panelists devoted 83 minutes to discussing Republicans and the Trump administration with overwhelming negativity.
“The panelists spent 83 minutes opining on Republicans, focusing on Trump and his administration, in 93% negative fashion (77 minutes negative, six minutes positive),” the MRC report reads.
Even topics where the Trump administration demonstrated success, such as the strike on Iran’s nuclear program, received predominantly negative coverage at 82% unfavorable.
Trump’s Immigration Policy (including the judiciary conflict), the show’s third most-discussed issue pertaining to Republicans, received 100% negative coverage, despite the Trump administration’s significant advancements in border security.
The study reveals that show introductions by moderator Jeffrey Goldberg frequently established an anti-Trump tone from the outset, with examples including: “Most presidents wait until they leave the White House to cash in. President Trump takes a different approach. Crypto deals, hotels, golf courses, 747s, everything is on the table.”
Panel representation skewed heavily toward left-leaning media outlets, with 13 of the 14 news organizations represented leaning Left.
The New York Times led with six different reporters appearing on the program, while the single non-liberal outlet, The Dispatch, had just one representative who “matched the harsh anti-Trump tone” of other panelists, the study says.
PBS’s Washington Week panelists made numerous inflammatory statements, including PBS News Hour correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez claiming the administration “repeatedly emboldened extremists and used hate speech to talk about their political enemies,” and that “normalizing the populace to political violence is a trait of authoritarianism.”
The study notes that PBS, which receives taxpayer funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was established with a congressional mandate requiring “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature” – a standard the MRC analysis suggests is not being met.
PBS receives approximately $445 million annually through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with American taxpayers footing the bill regardless of political affiliation.
While Republican topics received 83 minutes of coverage that was overwhelmingly negative, Democratic coverage was minimal outside a single episode focused on the Biden campaign exposé book “Original Sin,” which detailed the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline.
“Virtually all Democratic coverage came from the May 23 special episode on the Biden campaign expose Original Sin,” the study says. “Remove that episode, and the Democrats received a piddling 61 seconds of ‘coverage’ (18 seconds negative, 43 seconds positive), which consisted of fleeting mentions within Trump-related stories.”
The study concluded that the taxpayer-funded program “continues to grossly betray its mandate to the American taxpayer to provide ideological balance” as required by its congressional charter.
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