By Prof. Bill Willers

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was established in 1969 as a publicly-funded, commercial-free nonprofit focused on educational programming. Being “public” would naturally demand balanced coverage, but charges of bias have been unrelenting, primarily from the Right, so public funding has been steadily chipped away. Currently, only about 15% comes from governmental subsidies, so the “public” is primarily in the name.

The PBS NewsHour airs five nights week. It differs not a whit from the rest of mainstream “legacy” media news in its “lying by omission” of material from the vast landscape of facts and schools of thought out of step with key official narratives. The Overton Window, that informational cage keeping the public ignorant of unwanted particulars, is strictly adhered to at PBS.

On Fridays, the PBS NewsHour has for years been followed by Washington Week, a half-hour discussion of current political issues with a moderator plus three or four other mainstream journalists. Suddenly, in August, 2023, the program became “Washington Week With The Atlantic” with The Atlantic Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, moderator. Even the most anti-Trump individuals might be amazed at the level of anti-Trump focus, week after week, now being seen on what is theoretically to be a program of balanced coverage. The Atlantic Magazine, with Goldberg at the helm since 2016, represents a hard-hitting pro-Zionist, anti-Trump agenda, and it needs to be recognized that PBS has openly chosen to make that agenda a central aspect of its identity.

Jeffrey Goldberg himself is high within the Zionist power spectrum, having attended as a youth a socialist Zionist summer camp, later moving to Israel where he was a corporal in the Israeli Defense Force, a prison guard at Israel’s Ktzi’ot Prison for Palestinian prisoners (This is his book on the subject). He is a regular speaker at Zionist organizations. A good indicator of The Atlantic’s domination of the PBS Washington Week program can be seen in its year-end presentation on December 29, 2023 in which, in addition to moderator Goldberg, two of the four attendees were staff writers for The Atlantic, with a third the magazine’s Executive Editor. Goldberg even quips jokingly during the program about “an Atlantic takeover”.

But it’s nothing to chuckle about. Two items now generating extraordinary division in the country are Zionist versus Palestinian interests along with Democratic/Biden/globalist versus Republican/Trump/nationalist priorities. Divisions are so intense there is even unease concerning the possibility of civil war. The best of journalistic balance and exploration of all sides of hotly contested issues has not been greater in living memory, and yet PBS has made the startling decision to join forces with a publication the agenda of which is clearly one-sided.

In his Sept., 2023 13,000-word biography of General Mark Milley, a de facto anti-Trump hit piece by means of his dissection of the Milley-Trump relationship, Goldberg describes the era itself as “… not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve”. Milley is depicted as savior of America from a President that Goldberg describes as characterized by “cognitive unfitness and moral derangement”, and whose “attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.” It’s interesting that Goldberg, in weaving his political worldview, uses a General who, although troubled by some of Trump’s characteristics, himself avoids political involvement as improper for military figures. Along the way, Goldberg lambastes what he calls “Trumpists”, eg his reference to “Michael Flynn, Trump’s QAnon-addled first national security adviser.” 

Goldberg repeats a report that Milley feared Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election”, thus reinforcing the “honest election” mantra at a time when indication of election fraud in 2020 continues to mount (About that, see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). In the same article, he also reinforces the fabricated myth that al-Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center, as if the wealth of accumulated data by physicists and engineers demonstrating that the three buildings had been professionally wired for demolition prior to 9/11/2001 simply don’t exist. But then, for Goldberg, such information would naturally be avoided, for why would a staunch Zionist want to spotlight evidence of Mossad’s involvement in the 9/11attack? This reinforcement he accomplishes through his quoting of Milley: “And our primary goal for going there [Afghanistan] was to prevent al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization from striking the United States ever again….. And we have not, to date, been attacked from Afghanistan…..”   

As the probability of Trump winning the 2024 election continues to grow, those intent on attacking him over the years are showing real fear, as the Jan/Feb, 2024 issue of The Atlantic Magazine makes clear with “IF TRUMP WINS” emblazoned on its cover next to a long list of anti-Trump articles by the magazine’s staff writers. “He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order …. and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies”, claims Barton Gelman. George Packer writes that “Trump wants power again for two reasons, and a policy agenda isn’t one of them: to remove the humiliating stain of defeat … and to exact revenge on his enemies”, and “It’s not hard to imagine Trump breaking laws to go after journalists.” Franklin Foer predicts that a second Trump term would yield “a Mafia state”. 

But it’s “The Revenge Presidency“ by Atlantic’s staff writer David Frum that neatly sums up fear of Trump. Frum, a leading neoconservative and as prominent a Zionist as Goldberg, writes that Trump, if allowed a second term, would have “… a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries …”. He would “destroy the rule of law” and create “a landscape of unthinkable scenarios”. With Trump, “The whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward.”

And so it goes with other anti-Trump commentary in the issue with titles such as “The Truth Won’t Matter” and “Civil Rights Undone”. Conspicuous in its absence is any objective journalistic exploration of why so many Americans, including traditional Democrats, have been inclined to move in Trump’s direction. But the partisan ideology that is central to The Atlantic Magazine is exactly where PBS has decided to position itself in the current political world. By turning its week ending political wrap-up over to The Atlantic Magazine, PBS has effectively erased any remaining vestiges of journalistic “balance”, having let itself be transformed into a video version of the ideologically-driven magazine.