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Over at taxpayer-funded PBS, there was quite the bit of grousing over the level of intensity of the interview of President Elect Donald Trump that aired on NBC’s Meet the Press. As they complained about the lack of fact-checking, they demonstrated why both the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS should be among the first targets of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) once it is fully operational. 

Watch as PBS NewsHour anchor Amna Nawaz and White House Correspondent Laura Barrón-López (LBL) complain about a perceived lack of real-time fact-checking and pushback on the part of Kristen Welker:

AMNA NAWAZ: Laura, we’ve talked before — a lot of news organizations have reported on the challenges of interviewing President-Elect Trump because of the frequency and the volume of many of the lies he puts forward. It was well-documented during the campaign season as well. How did NBC handle it in this interview?

LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ: So, NBC initially put out an edited interview that added some context, they also released a transcript, and then they ultimately released the entire, full, unedited interview. But during the interview itself, Amna, there was very little to no fact-checking, very little to no pushback in real-time as Donald Trump was repeating falsehoods that he made during the campaign trail as well as outright lies.

I am old enough to remember the 2012 presidential campaign, also known as the quaint Before Times, when GOP candidate Mitt Romney was accused of “wanting to kill Big Bird” because he wanted to reduce funding to PBS. Twelve years later, you have an anchor and a White House correspondent proving Romney right by whining about the fact that the Republican didn’t get enough of an adversarial interview.

In fact, it was Welker who put forth a number of falsehoods and misrepresentations, such as her insistence that migrant gangs did not take over apartment complexes in Colorado, and her omissive citation of the 14th Amendment when arguing in favor of birthright citizenship. One is left to wonder what interview Nawaz and LBL might have been watching instead, because Welker was all over the place with her constant interruptions and attempted fact-checks of Trump. 

PBS’s continued insistence on distorting the news, when not otherwise promoting (to put it charitably) pedoplilia-adjacent legislation, renders them a prime target for the DOGE chainsaw. So long as there are homeless veterans on the streets and displaced North Carolinians sleeping in tents in freezing weather, they should remain a funding priority for the Congress- certainly far  above PBS.