Just like the networks spent months helpfully skipping over the Nazi tattoo on the chest of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, they have largely ignored radical leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. ABC and NBC haven't found him, while CBS broke the mold with two stories.
The PBS NewsHour hasn't mentioned Piker, although there was a mention on the PBS show Washington Week with The Atlantic on August 14. The show's host, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, volunteered: "The party has developed something of a Hasan Piker problem. This is a popular hard-left Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11, that Jews are inbred. He's praised Mao. He's praised Houthi terrorists and so on. Democrats are extremely worried about the presence of people like this who are no longer at the margin, who are creating, let's say, loads of new ads, if nothing else, for Republicans."
National Public Radio offered more coverage, but none of it dipped to the level of loopy detail that Goldberg did. "America deserved 9/11" never came up, or the Houthis, or praising Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong as a great leader. On the June 15 "All Things Considered," Elena Moore, who covers young voters for NPR, tamely described Piker as "a leftist streamer who's been stumping for progressive candidates. He's got an audience of millions across social media, but he's also, Ailsa, divisive because of his strong anti-Israel beliefs."
Moore at least noted he said he "would vote for Hamas over Israel" every single time. After running a sound bite from her Piker interview about why he's endorsing candidates, Moore added: "And Piker's followers are left-leaning, but he does have a politically valuable audience, which he describes as majority young, white and male, a group that Democrats lost ground with in 2024."
The next day, Moore then took this topic to "The NPR Politics Podcast." She repeated the same basics, including the pro-Hamas quote. But he was just a "leftist" or "left-leaning." NPR White House reporter Danielle Kurtzleben brought up Nick Fuentes as kind of an opposing figure, but then she regretted it. "Hasan Piker, he is a leftist. To be clear, I am not saying that's the mirror of white nationalists."
Fuentes loves Hitler, Piker loves Mao. So aren't they similar in an obvious way?
The imbalance continued as NPR reporter Miles Parks added, "The late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, someone who for a long time was seen as fringe. And then of course, as Trump became less and less fringe, as did he in the Republican Party." Leftists can never find a "fringe" on their side.
There were two other brief mentions of Piker on "Morning Edition" (July 27 and August 11) where Piker was mentioned in passing as a "leftist Twitch streamer" in one story and a "left-wing streamer" in the other.
On the August 6 "Morning Edition," NPR host Michel Martin interviewed former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod, who lamented that Republican Mike Rogers has been "able to create a distraction by using the DSA and Hasan Piker and some of the more radical elements of your coalition to change the subject." At least the word "radical" was uttered.
But Martin just wanted Axelrod's advice on how El-Sayed can get around the GOP, to avoid "allowing his ethnicity, his heritage to sort of be used against him?" Does he have the "political skill to navigate these traps?"
This betrays some of the real objectives of "public broadcasting." They help their allies on the Left "navigate traps" set by those objectionable Republicans who are trying to "create a distraction."
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.