Caterwauling Over a Kennedy Center Coup

Tim Graham on Apr 4, 2025

Our media elites love to tout themselves as "independent" and "fact-based." But on almost any story on Donald Trump, they can't help but put those words in the shredder.

The Kennedy Center illustrates one major difference between the two Trump terms. In the first term, the president deferred to the leftists who gave all the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017 to Democrats and Trump haters. He chose not to attend the ceremony so no honoree would refuse to attend and then hail themselves as "brave." It was atypically polite and deferential, and Trump received zero credit.

In the second term, Trump quickly proclaimed himself Kennedy Center chairman and kicked out the management. While the Kennedy Center hasn't been a blazing hot spot of woke culture, the media's intense reaction to this action demonstrated this space is not for all Americans.

This place has drawn way less controversy than that putrid public-private partnership known as "public broadcasting," which is unquestionably conquered leftist territory. But the media accounts have been full of overwrought angst.

On CBS's "Sunday Morning," former "Evening News" anchor Norah O'Donnell assembled all the anti-Trump talking points. She turned to pop musician Ben Folds, who served as an artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra. He worried out loud that artists who have "different views than the president" would feel "safe saying what they believe."

There are three questions I would ask Mr. Folds. First, are artists coming to perform, or make political speeches? (The stand-up comics they pick are probably doing both.)

Second, isn't it obvious that people who support the president might not "feel safe" in stating their beliefs there? Trump actually stayed away from events, so that demonstrated intolerance on the Left. In its story, CBS showed Vice President JD Vance and his family getting booed during a recent visit, so what happened to "arts for everyone"?

Third, why does the Left always suggest that conservatives couldn't possibly be seen as patrons of "the arts"? Artists, they believe, are sensitive souls, not callous brutes. Their assumption seems to be that Shakespeare and symphonies aren't really attractive to the right-wingers, who are the types that drink cheap beer and watch professional wrestling.

CBS unloaded this whopper from Folds: "There is an instinct, an authoritarian instinct, that is true in all authoritarian times in history: Take control of the culture, take control of the arts early on."

Well, heavens to Gramsci, the Left are the most ardent enthusiasts in controlling the culture. Their fierce grip on the culture is demonstrated when the "culture wars" are only identified when someone challenges leftist dominance.

Here's the worst part. CBS and O'Donnell laid down this line that Trump is a dictator, no "fact check" included. Instead of finding someone to object, O'Donnell announced: "We reached out to the White House and Kennedy Center for this story. No one responded to our request for interviews."

In reality, calling around to conservatives would easily find many of us willing to debate Folds on his Incipient Hitler Theory. We could start by mocking Folds as a 2016 backer of socialist Bernie Sanders, the guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Who backed a rigid authoritarian for president? Taking the reins of the Kennedy Center is much less invasive to Americans than a federal takeover of the entire health care system.

The hypocrites at liberal TV networks wail about "authoritarianism," but it is they who are unwilling to engage with an opposing point of view. They prefer a national "debate" that's one-sided and mean-spirited. They are what they claim to oppose.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.