I’ve often wondered whether Democrats genuinely believe the rhetoric they so frequently espouse, or if they’re merely toeing the party line. That question resurfaced on Sunday morning as I read the latest comments from PBS host and New York Times columnist David Brooks, political strategist James Carville, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — and found myself genuinely astounded by their tone-deafness.
Speaking to colleagues Amna Nawaz and Jonathan Capeheart during a recent edition of PBS NewsHour about President Donald Trump’s executive order to end federal funding for PBS and NPR due to their biased coverage of the news, Brooks asked an extraordinary question: “Who’s more straight down the line than we [PBS] are?” According to Brooks:
At its core, the Trump administration … think[s] progressive elites have destroyed the country, we need to take progressive elites down.And that’s whether they’re in museums and sciences and universities, whatever. And so, in some sense, they have some case to be made that the elites have become a little more progressive. …And I would say, if you think that PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America — and I shouldn’t be defending us. I get paid by PBS.[LAUGHTER]But I’m going to do it — who’s more straight down the line than we are.Is it MSNBC? Is it FOX? Is it CNN? Lisa Desjardins, like, one of the great journalists of our time? And so I will defend PBS, A, because I know how good we do in relative terms, but, B, because we travel around the country. We see the local affiliates where they’re not doing some ideological thing. They are the voice of their community.
Since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s establishment by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the political content on most public media channels has leaned heavily to the left. As a result, every Republican presidential administration has attempted to defund it—and, by extension, the PBS and NPR-affiliated outlets it distributes funds to.
Both PBS and NPR are indistinguishable from the legacy media in that they offer readers only one side of every story.
In the Thursday edition of his podcast, Carville essentially told guest Ryan Lizza that Democrats can’t lie like the Republicans do, because their “people” wouldn’t tolerate it.
People say to me all the time, ‘James, why don’t we just do like the Republicans do, just stand up and lie?’Because our f***ing people wouldn’t stand for it!If I stood up and lied, you would be the first person to say, ‘James Carville lost all credibility last night when he said X, Y and Z.’Yeah, I can spin. I can shade. Everybody does that. They [Republicans] just look you right in the eye and lie! And then our people say, ‘We ought to lie like them!’ No, we shouldn’t! Cause they would not do that. It would not go over well.
Didn’t the Democrats look Americans in the eye for four years and tell us that former President Joe Biden was fine? It was only after he left office that left-wing journalists felt free to reveal what had been happening behind closed doors.
They also told us that Trump was an agent of Russia, that the emails and messages on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were all part of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that the border was secure.
Indeed, Trump often exaggerates. He’s claimed the U.S. has provided $350 billion in assistance to Ukraine when the true figure is closer to $200 billion, and he calls his decisive 2024 victory a landslide, which it was not. But to my knowledge, he has never told the American people something that was demonstrably false.
So, is Carville lying to us, or does he truly believe what he says?
And finally, during a PBS interview at the Reframe Festival in San Francisco on Friday, Pelosi noted it was up to politicians to make sure the public knows what is in their best interest.
“When somebody doesn’t get a message, it’s not because of them. It’s because of us, who are delivering the message, that we did not deliver it clearly enough. This guy comes along and says he’s going to lower prices. He hasn’t. He’s going to do this. He’s going to do that. All a smokescreen. But we have to make sure the public knows what is in their interest,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi and others seem to underestimate the intelligence of the American public, as if we’re incapable of understanding our own best interests. But we don’t need to be told what to think — we have minds of our own and a clear sense of what we need.
Over the past few days, all three of these prominent and influential voices from the left made strikingly out-of-touch, misleading remarks, which may be the reason the Democratic Party currently finds itself in the wilderness.
The question remains: are they deliberately trying to mislead the public, or have years spent inside the left-wing echo chamber taken a toll on their judgment and clarity?
Readers?
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn or X.
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