One of the most common criticisms of the PBS NewsHour is that it too often mimics the elite bias of the commercial media.

A recent broadcast of the NewsHour (6/8/11) had two segments about the debate over the Afghan War--the first a news report covering the Senate nomination hearings for Ryan Crocker, Obama's nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Quoted in the piece were senators Jim Webb (D.-Va.) and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Barack Obama.

The discussion segment that accompanied it featured two more senators: Republican Saxby Chambliss  of Georgia and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez. Chambliss is a supporter of the war, with some reservations, while Menendez wants to continue the war with a different strategy: 

I think you could do more of a counterterrorism effort, where you are striking at Al-Qaeda and along the Afghan/Pakistan border, even striking at the Taliban to just to continue destabilize them.

As FAIR pointed out in our most recent study of the NewsHour, actual opponents of the war are hard to find.

On June 7, the NewsHour had a discussion about the state of the economy, and what the White House might be able to do to turn things around. Again, the guestlist was disappointing. Here's Gwen Ifill's introduction:

We explore that now with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C., and Tom Binnings, senior partner at Summit Economics in Colorado.

A Beltway political reporter for a mainstream daily, an economist for a bank and a partner at an economic forecasting firm. The banker expressed a view common in corporate America--that there's too much government regulation. ("It seems that regulation has increased.... Companies are really kind of put off by the amount of regulations that are hitting them all at once.")

There was little challenge to that sentiment--a predictable outcome, given the guests that the show booked to talk about the issue. The NewsHour should do better.

Last night (3/24/11) Jim Lehrer introduced a NewsHour discussion segment about the Libya War:

Now, how it looks to two former U.S. senators, Democrat Gary Hart of Colorado and Republican Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Senator Hart is now a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado and chair of the Defense Department's Threat Reduction Advisory Council. Senator Coleman is CEO of the American Action Network, an issue advocacy organization that supports Republican candidates and policies.

The same broadcast featured an interview with Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.

Monday's broadcast featured this segment:

JIM LEHRER: Now some perspective on the Mideast turmoil from two former U.S. national security advisers. Zbigniew Brzezinski held that post for President Carter. He's now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Brent Scowcroft had that same job during the George H.W. Bush administration. He now has his own consulting firm.

And also this one:

GWEN IFILL: Now, for a closer look at the situation in Libya, we turn to retired Maj. Gen. Dutch Remkes. He spent 32 years in the Air Force, including service -- service as a top commander of Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over Iraq. And Robert Malley, he served as director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He's now Middle East and North Africa program director at the International Crisis Group.

That's a lot of Official Voices--exactly the sorts of folks well represented everywhere else in the media. PBS exists (in theory at least) to bring us something more. Unfortunately, this sort of coverage is par for the course on the NewsHour.

UPDATE: Last night's NewsHour:

JEFFREY BROWN: And we assess the military campaign in Libya now.

 For that, we're joined by retired Army Gen. Jack Keane. He was Army vice chief of staff when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. He now has his own consulting firm. And Frederic Wehrey is a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. As an Air Force Reserve officer, he served as a military attache in Libya in 2009 and then earlier this year.

 Keane favors putting U.S. Special Forces on the ground in Libya. Wehrey, on the other hand, agrees with that idea.

On Wednesday night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (9/23/10), Gwen Ifill announced: "Now to the first of several conversations on whether or not to extend tax cuts that expire at the end of the year."

The first guest was Republican Glenn Hubbard, who Ifill told viewers "was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and he helped to design those cuts." Not surprisingly, he is a big supporter of extending the tax cuts, and gave the usual laundry list of reasons why, and criticized Obama for creating uncertainty in the markets and so on.

So who else will they feature in this series? One clue came at the end of the show:

JUDY WOODRUFF: In our next conversation, we will hear from Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who once testified in favor of the Bush tax cuts. He now argues, it's time to let them lapse.

Greenspan, it should be noted, is a conservative Republican, elevated to the Fed by Ronald Reagan, and a lifelong devotee of Ayn Rand. If the point of the series is to explore the tax debate among conservatives, the NewsHour is off to a great start.

Ifill has previously despaired at the partisanship of this debate--Republicans say one thing, Democrats say something else, which led her to wonder: "Is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?"

Sorting it out is the job of journalists. NewsHour can't do that without finding some independent experts to talk about the issue.

There was something depressing about a recent discussion on the PBS NewsHour Monday night (9/13/10) about the debate over what to do with the Bush-era tax cuts.

The politics of the tax debate is well-known; most Democrats want to extend them for all but the top brackets, while the Republicans want to renew the cuts that affect only the wealthiest taxpayers (which could cost the government an additional $700 billion in lost revenue over the next decade). The Republican argument is that allowing the tax cuts to expire on families earning more than $250,000 would hurt "small businesses."

So here's how host Gwen Ifill and Wall Street Journal reporter Naftali Bendavid summed things up:

GWEN IFILL: But when it comes right down to it--and we've debated this endlessly on this program, exactly about who is right about this. But when the president says it's a $700 billion bill to do it the way the Republicans want, and the Republicans say you're raising the taxes on people who are the engines of the economy, is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?

NAFTALI BENDAVID: Well, my sense is that it's in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain. There are compromises that are being floated. You know, there's a proposal out there to only raise taxes on people making a million or more, so it would really be the high-end earners. But my sense is that this is much more about both parties having a position than about reaching some sort of compromise.

Of course political parties disagree; that's a given. But that disagreement doesn't make things "uncertain." Reporters can--and obviously should--evaluate the strength of the arguments coming from politicians, and not merely relay contradictory claims; that's the real way to sort things out that Ifill is looking for.

So when Republicans say that a tax increase on the wealthy is a small-business-harming job-killer, reporters should tell people whether there's any reason to believe that. (Hint: There isn't.) When journalists refuse to do their jobs, and are content to sit neutrally by while politicians posture endlessly, the debate goes from bad to worse.

PBS's NewsHour's  Gwen Ifill (9/15/09), quizzing Richard Goldstone on his U.N. fact-finding mission that found that both Israel and Palestinian fighters had committed war crimes in the Gaza conflict:

The term "even-handed" is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of the Palestinians. Why is that?

CBS News (9/9/09), summarizing a report by Israel's leading human rights group:

Well over half of nearly 1,400 Palestinians killed in Israel's Gaza war were civilians, including 252 children younger than 16, a leading Israeli human rights groups said Wednesday, challenging Israel's claim that most of the dead were militants.... The Israeli rights group B'Tselem on Wednesday published figures it said were compiled in months of research, including visits to families of victims. It said 1,387 Gazans were killed, including 773 civilians and 330 combatants. Thirteen Israelis also died, including four civilians.

So why would the U.N. be more interested in the war crimes that killed nearly 200 times as many people? Thanks to Ifill and the NewsHour for challenging this strange moral reasoning.

Noticing how PBS's Gwen Ifill has a penchant for "filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week," critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent "discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified was how the Obama administration should deal with the political fallout from the demands for a full-scale investigation and/or prosecution of the officials responsible for American torture."

Kaiser's question of whether it would "ruin the discussion to have one person who believes that a full investigation of American torture and prosecutions of those responsible for it are the only way to rescue the honor of America" received a curt reply from Ifill: "Opinion? You were watching the wrong program if that's what you were looking for."

Aside from its snide tone, Kaiser spells out for Ifill exactly what's wrong with this view:

Gwen,

Everyone at that table obviously believed that investigating and/or prosecuting torture was a political problem for the Obama administration, and nothing more.

That is an opinion, Gwen. The fact that all of you shared it doesn't make it anything else. It does mean you were incapable of acknowledging any other point of view.

This is why we call it "the Washington bubble."

To top it off, after Ifill's subsequent offer to "feel free to call me during working hours. You know how," Kaiser reports that "after three more e-mail requests for an interview, and four voicemails left for Ifill and her two producers over two weeks, the anchorwoman never managed to return any of our phone calls."