Peter Hart at Fairness and Accuracy in Media writes Who Gets to Speak on Cable News? The identity of the whitest, malest show we found may surprise you. An excerpt:
| A survey of major cable news discussion programs shows a stunning lack of diversity among the guests.
FAIR surveyed five weeks of broadcasts of the interview/discussion segments on several leading one-hour cable shows: CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and OutFront With Erin Burnett, All In With Chris Hayes and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor and Hannity. Guests were coded by gender, race/ethnicity and occupation, as well as the affiliations of partisan guests-those who are identified with a party as current or former government officials or campaign professionals. Data was collected during the first two weeks of February, the first week of March and the first two weeks of April. (Fewer weeks were monitored in March to limit the distorting effects of the singular focus on the missing Malaysian plane story.) Guests who appeared in interview or roundtable segments were the only appearances that were included; taped segments, which normally include a correspondent and soundbites from various guests, were excluded. In total, there were 1,015 guests in the five-week period. Maddow was an outlier with only 49 guests during the study period; the other shows ranged from All In with 164 to AC360 and OutFront, both with 212. Among guests with a partisan affiliation, Democrats outnumbered Republicans, 104 to 84. That is almost entirely due to the lopsided nature of partisan-identified guests on MSNBC. All In With Chris Hayes had a 35-7 advantage for Democrats, while Rachel Maddow had 12 Democrats to two Republicans. Fox News Channel, as you might expect, featured more Republicans than Democrats, but the GOP enjoyed a more modest advantage: 24-15 on the O’Reilly Factor and 29-21 on Hannity. Many of the Democrats appearing on Fox News are what one might call “Fox News Democrats” (Extra!, 3/12), people like Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckel and Lanny Davis, who often represent a center-right faction of the party and are called on to bash more progressive Democrats. […] Eighty-four percent of guests were white (848). The most and least diverse shows in terms of ethnicity were both on MSNBC: People of color were 27 percent of guests on All In and only 6 percent on Maddow. Just three of Maddow’s guests were people of color; none of these were women. |
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Bush and African Americans:
Headline: “Bush laments poor Republican relations with blacks.”
Republicans didn’t “write off” blacks, they used them as a demonizable prop to bring in the Dixiecrat vote into their fold. And who is Bush to talk, given the disaster he ignored in New Orleans? He could rush to DC on a midnight flight to sign the “let’s meddle in the Schiavo family’s affairs” bill, but couldn’t be bothered to cut his six-week vacation short when Katrina hit. |
— @BruceBartlett
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