Congress already voted to defund PBS over its left wing bias.
This week a guest used that platform to settle an old score with Ronald Reagan.
Then his real target turned out to be sitting in the Oval Office right now.
Amanpour Set Up A Trip Down Memory Lane And McKibben Took It Somewhere Else
Amanpour asked Bill McKibben, a longtime environmental activist, to walk viewers through Jimmy Carter's response to the 1970s oil crisis and his push for solar power at the White House.
McKibben did not stop at nostalgia.
He told Amanpour that Carter's plan called for the sun to supply a fifth of America's power by the year 2000.
Then he pivoted straight into blaming Reagan for killing it.
"He took down those solar panels from the White House roof," McKibben said.
Carter installed thirty two solar panels on the West Wing roof in 1979 to heat water for the White House.
Reagan's staff had them removed in 1986, and the panels sat in a government warehouse for five years until a college in Maine finally took them.
McKibben has spent years turning that removal into a morality play about Republicans and the planet.
This time he did not just blame Reagan.
He used the platform to go after Trump directly.
McKibben Called Trump's Last Eighteen Months an Act of Economic Sabotage
McKibben went further, telling Amanpour no president has done more damage to the economy than Trump in the last year and a half.
That is not a policy critique.
That is a taxpayer funded broadcast handing an activist a microphone to trash Trump in the same breath as Reagan.
Reagan's actual energy record looked nothing like the villain story McKibben told on PBS.
Reagan lifted the last federal price controls on oil within eight days of taking office.
By 1986 oil had fallen from thirty six dollars a barrel to twelve, and gas had dropped from a dollar twenty five a gallon to eighty two cents.
McKibben's version skips all of it and lands on one villain.
None of that fits the story McKibben wanted to tell on national television.
He also skipped China entirely.
China's emissions per capita have climbed for two decades while America's have fallen, yet McKibben saved his outrage for the man sitting in the Oval Office right now.
Congress Already Stripped PBS of a Billion Dollars in Funding
This segment did not happen in a vacuum.
The House passed that measure 216 to 213 last year, cutting one billion dollars from public broadcasting after decades of complaints that PBS and NPR lean hard left.
Nixon tried to cut public broadcasting.
Reagan tried.
Trump succeeded where two Republican presidents before him could not.
PBS spent that fight insisting it plays it straight down the middle.
PBS's own leadership warned the cuts would hurt rural stations, never once addressing the bias complaints that drove the vote.
Then it put an activist on air to blame a dead president and insult a sitting one, and nobody at the network blinked.
No one at Amanpour and Company asked McKibben a single follow up question.
https://x.com/alexchristy17/status/2082482595938402639“>https://x.com/alexchristy17/status/2082482595938402639
PBS Just Proved Its Critics Right in Real Time
McKibben is not a scientist testifying under oath, he is an activist with a decades long grudge against Reagan and a fresh target in Trump.
PBS did not challenge a single claim.
Amanpour teed up the softball question about Carter and let McKibben run with it straight into an attack on the current president, with the cameras still rolling.
That is the pattern conservatives have flagged for fifty years and the reason Congress finally pulled the plug on the funding.
Reagan let markets work and gas prices fell by more than a third by the time he left office.
McKibben wants credit for a solar fantasy that never had to compete in the real world, and he wants Trump blamed for daring to reverse course on the green spending binge that came before him.
The eighteen months McKibben calls sabotage are the same eighteen months that have seen American energy production climb while Washington stopped picking winners and losers.
Taxpayers are still footing the bill for the network that let him say it.
That is not bias slipping through the cracks, that is PBS proving its critics right on live television.
Sources:
- Alex Christy, "PBS Claims Climate Change Is Mostly Ronald Reagan's Fault," NewsBusters, July 29, 2026.
- "Liberals Blast Congressional Vote to Defund PBS and NPR by $1 Billion," Fox News, July 18, 2025.
- Ronald Reagan, "Radio Address to the Nation on Oil Prices," Reagan Presidential Library, April 19, 1986.
