Political Talk: All Male, All White, All The Time

The Newark Star-Ledger

By Alicia C. Shepard

One Sunday, as I struggled on the elliptical machine, I glanced up at NBC’s “Meet the Press” on a nearby TV and was stunned. Host Tim Russert was interviewing not one but three bright female journalists in a roundtable discussion about the war in Iraq.

I remember thinking: “That is so cool.” Then I paused and realized that my tiny moment of pride at my gender’s success in breaking into the Big Time political talk arena was so remarkable only because it is so rare.

Are white males just smarter, more articulate and better informed than the rest of the population? If the powerful Sunday morning political shows or prime-time cable television talk shows are any reflection of society, they are. At least, that’s what the bookers, hosts and producers of these shows must think, because they aren’t putting women or people of color on them.

Yet another nonprofit group has looked into the issue and found women and minorities largely absent from these agenda-setting shows, whether they are on Sunday or during weeknight popular cable shout shows. Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, this month released two reports that studied the guest lists of the network and cable talk shows that dominate the airwaves and influence American political discourse.

Looking at 2,150 guests that appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” CBS’ “Face the Nation,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Fox’s “Fox News Sunday” in 2005 and 2006, the featured guests were - pause - overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male, according to Media Matters.

Not surprisingly, the hosts, George Stephanopoulos, Bob Schieffer, Tim Russert and Chris Wallace are also white males.

The study, “Sunday Shutout” found:

On average, men outnumber women on “Meet the Press,” “This Week,” “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” 4-to-1.

On “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation,” there were nearly nine white guests for every guest of another race or ethnicity. The last two programs both have longtime, smart, white, female executive producers.

Eighty-five percent of guests on “Meet the Press” were white; 76 percent male.

Eighty percent of guests on “Face the Nation” were white; 72 percent male.

The news is no better for women and minorities on the three major cable news networks - CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC - in the prime-time hours of 7 to 10 p.m.

Media Matters’ other report - “Locked Out: The Lack of Gender & Ethnic Diversity on Cable News Continues” - showed that women and people of color were “severely underrepresented as guests on these cable networks” in the three weeks studied.

Media Matters got interested in the topic after its researchers noticed a sharp uptick in the number of females and minorities appearing on cable during the Don Imus controversy in April, when the former CBS radio host lost his job for making an on-air derogatory racial slur against Rutgers University’s female basketball team.

“Post-Imus, we thought that while the country was having a good discussion about race and gender, it would be good to see if any improvements came from it,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters. “Of course, what we found was a marginal improvement that disappeared almost after the week that followed Imus’ firing. Many people in the media acknowledged that the lack of diversity on these shows, in part, contributed to why Imus was able to get away with years of that type of joke and rhetoric.”

This all just might be newsworthy if the findings did not repeat what similar studies by The White House Project and the National Urban League Policy Institute found in 2001, 2002, 2005 and 2006.

“In 1958, Martin Luther King wrote: `It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning,’” according to the institute’s study in August 2005. “Today, nearly 50 years after Dr. King’s incisive observation about America’s churches, we are facing another form of Sunday Morning Apartheid: the Sunday morning talk shows.”

The institute found that in the period it studied, from January 2004 through June 2005, more than 60 percent of the Sunday morning public affairs programs had no black guests. And when they did have black guests, more than 69 percent of the appearances came from just three prominent African-Americans: National Public Radio senior correspondent Juan Williams; Colin Powell, then secretary of state who resigned in January 2005, and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser who became secretary of state when Powell resigned.

The institute updated the study in 2006 to cover two full years (2004 and 2005). “Although the preliminary report was widely-publicized - with the hope that networks would take it upon themselves to present a more diverse palette - the full two-year follow-up study showed no significant progress . . . Indeed, in some areas there has even been retrenchment,” said the 2006 report.

The nonprofit White House Project, which works on promoting women into leadership positions, first studied the number of women on five Sunday morning shows on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC in 2001 with “Who’s Talking.” They found only 11 percent of the guests were female. Fast forward to a 2005 follow-up study, and things aren’t much better: 14 percent. The 2005 study, called “Who’s Talking Now,” found that more than half of Sunday morning news shows did not include a single woman (Note to bookers: Women still make up half the population.)

After the 2005 study, “we met with Sunday talk show producers and bookers and they said the No. 1 reason they weren’t using women experts is they didn’t know any,” said Marie C. Wilson, president of the White House Project. “The main problem is the producers call who they know.”

Wilson decided to do something about this. Two years ago, she started SheSource.org, a database of over 300 female, TV-ready experts on a variety of subjects. “We are not only trying to shift the culture,” said Wilson, “but to get these bookers to break the cycle of calling only people they know. We are starting to see a change.”

That said, it’s 2007. A woman and a person of color are both running for president. Why do producers think we want to hear only what middle-aged white guys in ties think about Iraq, the presidential race, the economy, education or even why the price of oil is sky-high? Let’s not pretend these shows aren’t important. Like it or not, they are. They determine what issues become important and, worst of all, they give the impression that women and people of color lack credibility, expertise and authority.

It’s just not true.

May 27, 2007 | Filed Under Media Matters, News Mentions 

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