The PBS News Hour marked its 50th anniversary last year (and the show’s first year deprived of taxpayer funding) with a clip package of its coverage of various historical events, while declaring the program had traditionally strove to be “even-handed to a fault.” If that were ever true, the current version of the show, co-anchored by Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, certainly can’t make that claim.
A new Media Research Center study tracked and labeled every guest that appeared on the News Hour over the first six months of 2026 — January 1 through June 30 — and found that liberal-Democratic leaning guests outnumbered conservative-Republican leaning guests by 234–45, a ratio of 5.2 to 1 (186 guests were rated either neutral or nonpolitical).
That ratio surpasses findings from two previous MRC studies (3.7 to 1 in March 2023 and 4.2 to 1 in May 2025), meaning the bias has gone from bad to worse since PBS lost its government subsidy.