New Documentary Proves Trump Is Right to Defund PBS

Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS, wasted no time in condemning President Trump’s May 2 executive order cutting federal funding for the public broadcaster. Defunding her organization, she declared, “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming.” Only days earlier, however, PBS had aired just the kind of ideologically biased documentary that demonstrates why Trump is right to defund the network.

The documentary, Critical Condition: Health in Black America, focuses on a real and important problem: on average, health outcomes for black Americans are worse than those for people of other races. But instead of addressing the real causes of this crisis—namely group differences in diet, exercise, and health literacy—the documentary settles on the false, simplistic narrative peddled by activists that all differences in health outcomes must be caused by racism.

The documentary largely focuses on racial differences in maternal mortality—in particular, on differences in the incidence of preeclampsia—as evidence of systemic racism. But the biological predisposition for preeclampsia in black women, well-established in the medical literature, is never mentioned. In other words, the documentary misleads black mothers and valorizes shoddy social science over the rigorous research that could actually reduce racial disparity.

The documentary also fixates on racism in its discussion of medical algorithms, claiming that adjusting for race in tests of biological functioning serves no purpose other than reinforcing race as a biological construct. This is pure nonsense. Race-based adjustments demonstrably improve the precision of clinical algorithms. For example, African ancestry is associated with lower lung volumes and higher levels of muscle mass. When clinical algorithms don’t acknowledge these realities, they result in less accurate diagnoses of asthma, kidney disease, and other conditions.

The antidotes that the documentary proposes for the alleged systemic racism in medicine are equally unscientific. The film gives a fawning depiction of “implicit bias training” at Charles Drew University of Medicine, accompanied by a call for medical schools to increase their adoption of such activities. But research shows that implicit bias is neither detectable nor fixable. Trainings on this topic are thus completely unproductive—though they do serve to enrich the “diversity industrial complex.”

The documentary also calls for a greater focus on the racial composition of the health-care workforce. It arrives at this conclusion by citing research that allegedly shows minority patients receive better care from racially concordant doctors. This is yet another false claim that relies on a combination of cherry-picked studies and ideologically driven, methodologically unsound research, as I have shown in a report for Do No Harm.

Further, the false conclusion to which this flimsy evidence would lead us is the re-segregation of medicine: black patients would see only black physicians, white patients see white physicians, and so on. This is racial demagoguery masquerading as medical science.

This documentary is far from the only example of PBS putting radical ideology ahead of its mission to educate without partisan fear or favor. Nevertheless, its timing has beneficially performed at least one public service, by proving Trump right: American taxpayers shouldn’t fund the network.

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images