News Shows: White Men's Realm

By Joe Garofoli
The San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday 13 May 2007

Study documents lack of diversity on Sunday programs.

Here's a silver lining in last month's avalanche of news coverage of Don Imus: The disc jockey's racist and sexist remarks inspired at least one Sunday morning talk show to invite women and people of color to discuss Imus' comments.

Seeing nonwhite men on the Sunday shows is as rare as seeing them on the floor of the U.S. Senate. According to a study to be released Monday by the liberal media organization Media Matters for America, which was obtained by The Chronicle, at least 77 percent of the 2,150 guests who appeared on the four major Sunday shows in 2005-06 were men; at least 82 percent were white.

So that made the April 15 episode of NBC's "Meet the Press" somewhat unusual. PBS anchor Gwen Ifill and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson - both African Americans - were invited as panelists in the wake of the Imus controversy. On the show, Ifill criticized host Tim Russert for tacitly endorsing Imus' history of bigoted remarks by repeatedly appearing on the DJ's show.

"There has been radio silence from a lot of people who have done this program who could have spoken up and said, 'I find this offensive or I didn't know,'" Ifill said. Turning to Russert, Ifill said, "These people didn't speak up. Tim, we didn't hear from you."

Not only did the moment make for good TV, it was a rare example, analysts said, of how broadening the pool of talking heads can lead to a more inclusive and representative national conversation. Sunday shows are closely monitored by the nation's decision-makers, as a barometer of Beltway buzz.

"The April 15 broadcast of NBC's 'Meet the Press' is an excellent example of how much better these programs are capable of being when a group of diverse personalities and voices are brought together to discuss issues of the day," said Media Matters spokesman Karl Frisch. Ifill's comments showed how the chummy Beltway media could foster "an environment where Imus' history of bigoted language could be tolerated."

Representatives of the networks whose programs are cited in the study - ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox - either declined to comment or did not respond to requests to be interviewed.

According to the study, "Fox News Sunday" on the Fox News Channel offered the most diverse racial composition of guests, with 82 percent of its guests identifying white, 16 percent African American and the rest Latino or of other racial background. Media Matters said the higher proportion of African Americans on Fox can be attributed to the weekly appearances of National Public Radio senior correspondent Juan Williams, who accounted for 99 of the 126 appearances. The least diverse Sunday news program was CBS' "Face the Nation," whose guest list was 90 percent white.

"Fox News Sunday" also featured the highest percentage of female guests (37 percent) among the four Sunday shows studied. "Meet the Press" had the fewest (23 percent).

In terms of race and ethnicity, "African Americans are badly underrepresented on the Sunday shows, but Latinos fare even worse," according to the study's authors. Though the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Hispanics make up 14 percent of the U.S. population in 2004, the study found that only 1 percent of the Sunday guests are Latino.

People of color show up on the Sunday shows "most often when it is to discuss a 'black issue' or when there is clearly a racial angle to the conversation," said James Rucker, executive director of ColorofChange.org, a San Francisco organization that is trying to strengthen the political voice of African Americans. "But when it comes to everyday political discussions, they're not invited to the table."

The study's findings are similar to other studies of Sunday morning shows done over the past decade by organizations, including the media watchdog Fair and Accuracy in Reporting, the National Urban League and the White House Project, an organization that studies women in leadership positions.

In a 2001 survey that covered similar ground, the White House Project reported that men outnumbered women 9 to 1 on the Sunday shows.

Noting how men now outnumber women by roughly 4 to 1 in the Media Matters study, Gloria Felt, a board member of the Women's Media Center, said that the homogeneity of these shows contributes to the polarization of the nation's political debate. "People are either on one extreme side of an issue or another. To many women, that kind of discussion is a turn-off. They tend to see issues as more nuanced, to see that there are many sides to an issue."

The lack of female voices isn't confined to the Sunday shows. According to the Women's Media Center, "women hold only 3 percent of top positions in mainstream media, comprise less than one-quarter of newspaper opinion writers, and are virtually absent as columnists at major national print or online media outlets."

Producers at the national network shows rarely book guests with whom they are not familiar, said Sarah Bacon, a co-founder of SheSource.org, a 2-year-old clearinghouse of 328 female media sources. Producers have told Bacon they don't know where to find women and people of color.

"There should be no excuse. All you have to do is Google the name of any institution or think tank and start looking at the names or pictures of people," said Bacon, who works for Fenton Communications, a public relations firm.

But Bacon feels the situation could soon improve. Over the past six months, SheSource.org representatives have met with producers from a handful of networks and individual programs to discuss how to include more female voices on the air.

Last week at the National Press Club in Washington, the organization hosted an event where 50 female experts and 30 reporters and producers from various media outlets swapped business cards and mingled.

"Afterward," Bacon said, "everybody came up to us and thanked us. There's this incredible hunger for new voices."