PBS and NPR are generally unbiased, independent of government propaganda and provide key benefits to US democracy

  Champions of the almost entirely party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to erase US$1.1 billion in already approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called their action a refusal to subsidize liberal media.

  “Public broadcasting has long been overtaken by partisan activists,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, insisting there is no need for government to fund what he regards as biased media. “If you want to watch the left-wing propaganda, turn on MSNBC,” Cruz said.

  Accusing the media of liberal bias has been a consistent conservative complaint since the civil rights era, when white Southerners insisted news outlets were slanting their stories against segregation. During his presidential campaign in 1964, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona complained that the media was against him, an accusation that has been repeated by every Republican presidential candidate since.

Bias hiding in plain sight: Decades of analyses suggest US media skews anti-Palestinian

  News organizations are often accused of lacking impartiality when covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In November 2023, over 750 journalists signed an open letter alleging bias in U.S. newsrooms against Palestinians in the reporting of the ongoing fighting in the Gaza strip.

  More recently, two articles in respected U.S. newspapers highlight the debate over bias.

How media reports of ‘clashes’ mislead Americans about Israeli-Palestinian violence

  Israeli police attacked mourners carrying the coffin of slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 13, 2022, beating pallbearers with batons and kicking them when they fell to the ground.

  Yet those who skimmed the headlines of initial reports from several U.S. media outlets may have been left with a different impression of what happened.

Gene Policinski: We’re a big part of the fix for ‘junk news’

  Let’s stop talking so much about “fake news.”

  Not that we should ever cease identifying, talking about or countering misinformation, be it accidental error, the result of negligent work, or deliberately false — to which we must now add propaganda tactics aimed at destabilizing our democracy.

  We face all those types of misinformation today; amplified as they are by platforms that allow for instantaneous, worldwide communication.

Sharon Shahid: News ratings trumped credibility

  After one of the nastiest and most divisive presidential campaigns in recent memory, business tycoon Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States.

  It will probably take some time for the country to scrub out the mud that stained our democracy and gargle away the bad taste left in our collective mouths. But the country is still standing, and the ideals of the First Amendment remain firmly in place.