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GUEST: Paul Waldman, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, author of “Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservatives’ Success”

Earlier this week, Media Matters for America released a report that found cable news networks to be severely lacking in racial and gender diversity. The report, “Locked Out: The Lack of Gender and Ethnic Diversity on Cable News Continues,” examined prime time programs on three major networks: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Among the shows profiled were MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” and CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “Locked Out,” analyzed the guests on the three major networks in the time before, during and after the Don Imus controversy. While there was a slight increase in gender and ethnic diversity during the week of the Imus controversy, white males overwhelmingly dominated before and even after the controversial issue. Among the report’s other key findings is that Latino voices were underrepresented. In fact, of a total of 13 guest appearances by Latinos, six of them were by a single guest: Geraldo Rivera. Additionally, cable news hosts from 4 p.m. to midnight were all white and overwhelmingly male.

For more information visit www.mediamatters.org.

The report is available here: http://mediamatters.org/items/200705070003?f=h_top

Rough Transcript:

Sonali: First let’s talk about any differences that the study might have found between CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Is there any one of these three that’s worse than the others in terms of gender and racial diversity?

Waldman: Well, a little bit I mean we should say that overall they were all overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male, but you do see some small differences in this period that we looked at. MSNBC really came out the worst on both race and gender, and Fox News in some cases was actually a little better; some of their shows had more women on. What we see overall though is that you might find little differences, one show, one week has more women, another show another week might have a few more African Americans. Overall, there’s a real lack of diversity across all the cable news channels.

Sonali: Can you give us some percentages, just some numbers so we can actually understand exactly what this means, how many were men compared to women, people of color versus whites, etc.?

Waldman: Sure, just to set a context for a moment, the reason that we did this in the first place was because we noticed as we were watching cable news during the week of the Imus controversy, that all of a sudden you saw more black faces coming on, and it was striking because you don’t ordinarily see that. So we said, okay lets take a look at this, so we examined the week before the Imus controversy, the week after, and the week of the Imus controversy. We found that the week before the Imus controversy if you look at the shows there on those three cable networks, for instance ninety-three percent of the guests on MSNBC were white, eighty-eight percent on Fox. CNN was a little bit lower; they had only seventy-one percent of the guests were white because one of their primetime shows, Paula Zahn Now, was doing some programs about some racial issues. Then during the week of the Imus controversy, they all increased their representation of African Americans a little bit. CNN actually did the best, almost half of their guests during that week were African American, and the numbers for Fox and MSNBC were twenty-eight percent and thirty percent, so you did see a pretty diverse guest list. Then after the Imus controversy ended, it pretty much went back down to normal, and all of them were around between seventy-five and eighty percent or so. But as you mentioned, one of the real striking things was the just complete absence of Latino voices. Right now, in the United States, Latinos comprise around fourteen or fifteen percent of the American population; they were less than two percent of the guests in all these three weeks that we looked at. Obviously, there was a racial component to the Imus controversy, where it’s not surprising that they brought on more African Americans, but one would think that just in the ordinary course of events there would be at least more than two percent of the guests would be Latino, but that’s where those numbers were and that was really striking.

Sonali: You know there have been similar studies done on public radio, as well as on network TV by groups like FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and it looks like their numbers are very similar to this. It seems as though most media that is mainstream, that’s consumed by Americans by and large, suffers from this type of racial and gender dearth in terms of racial and gender diversity, and that also tends to reflect on the politics that are represented in these news media. And most of the right wing, or parts of the right wing, will accuse the news media of having a liberal bias. Did you at all take a look at the political leanings when you did this study?

Waldman: We didn’t in this case. We’ve done that before in some other contexts. We did a big report on the Sunday shows for instance – Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week – and we found there, for the last decade or so, they have been consistently over-representing conservative voices, both among the politicians who go on and also among the journalists who are asked to comment on events. So that’s something we see really in a lot of different contexts. You know the reason that it’s worth talking about this now as a result of the Imus controversy, is we did see that that week it was perfectly possible for them to bring on more African Americans when they decided it was relevant. There no reason why those guests couldn’t be brought on to talk about other issues, and that’s one of the things we find with news programs like this that when there is an issue with a racial component, then they will bring on African Americans to talk about it. But when we’re just talking about the ordinary progression of news and politics that goes on everyday, then those people aren’t invited on. But it’s not as though they’re hiding somewhere and the networks couldn’t find them if they wanted to, there are plenty of African Americans and Latinos who would be perfectly willing and able to have interesting things to say about any kind of issue that doesn’t have to be a racially charged issue or an issue that has some kind of component that’s directly related to their ethnicity. But it seems that unless it’s that kind of an issue, the networks just basically go with their standard line-up of white guys. I live in Washington and believe me, you can’t throw a stone in this town without finding someone who would give their right arm to go on television. The place is crawling with them, so it’s not as though it would be difficult for them to find a more diverse guest list, all they would have to do is make the effort.

Sonali: Now I’m looking at the results between males and females who are white in terms of hosts between four PM and midnight, and I understand the report found that all the hosts were white, so there’s really no other category to be represented here but the white category. So you do a gender breakdown, you find that eighty-three percent of the hosts are male and seventeen percent are female, so how does this host breakdown get reflected in the guest breakdown with respect to men and women, and specifically what about the representation of women of color?

Waldman: Well that was something that was also really notable; we chose to look at the 4 pm to midnight period because that’s when they have the kind of personality based shows, the shows that have the name of the person in the title, whether it’s Tucker Carlson or Bill O’Reilly or those kinds of shows, and as you said you know there were thirty five hosts and co-hosts during that period on, and in that case we actually looked at five cable networks we also included CNBC and Headline News. Of those thirty-five, all of them were white and 29 out of the 35 were men. We should say there are a few African Americans who do some hosting during the daytime on cable but in the afternoon to primetime-

Sonali: That’s not primetime.

Waldman: – they’re all white, and most are men. And so, what we did see is that the results weren’t quite that stark when we look at the guests, but it’s still pretty notable. You know, women tend to comprise around a third of the guests, and that would vary from show to show, some have more, some have fewer. But just sort of, to put it in stark terms, we did do one set of charts looking at white males versus minority females to look kind of at both ends of the spectrum over these three weeks, and what you see is that white men on any show can comprise anywhere from it may be a little less than half on some shows but all the way up to ninety-five percent for some others, but they’re definitely the clear majority. But when you look at minority females, there are almost none. Some shows didn’t have a single minority female in this entire three-week period. A couple of the other shows may have had a few; they might have during one week comprised as many as a quarter of the guests for one show, Paula Zahn Now, which I said did a series on diversity as it happens during this period, but typically they’l max out at maybe ten percent, in some cases much lower. So there just aren’t that many who are getting on these programs.

Sonali: Paul Waldman is my guest; he is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and we’re talking about a study that was just released on cable news networks that looked at racial and gender diversity among both guests and hosts at three major cable news outlets in the week before, the week during, and the week after the Don Imus controversy. I want you to compare, if you will, the racial and gender diversity between MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olberman – someone whose commentaries are routinely published on Alternet and Common Dreams – compare him to Bill O’Reilly who is I think the other end of the spectrum when it comes to political conservatism. Who fared better or worse in terms of gender and racial diversity?

Waldman: Well, during this period, as it happened, O’Reilly did a little better. And again, you know, when you’re looking at a specific show you can say ‘well, the next week they might have put on a couple of more African Americans or Latinos and that would totally skew the numbers,’ and that’s certainly true. We’re really looking at a snapshot here, but during this three week period Countdown was almost all white and almost all male and The O’Reilly Factor actually interestingly enough had more women on than any other show. His show during this three week period was pretty much evenly split between men and women, and he has a regular segment with Michelle Malkin(?), a conservative woman, and Kristen Powers is a democrat, and they come on and do a debate, and he happened to bring on more women than anybody else. Although, his guest list in this period was also overwhelmingly white. In the first week we looked at, it was ninety percent white; the second week it was seventy-six percent white; and the third week it was seventy-nine percent white. So he still has an overwhelmingly white guest list, but O’Reilly does bring on more women than most of the other of the cable programs.

Sonali: You know, I want to lead into, in the last few minutes of this interview, about the issue of racial and gender diversity not just in the mainstream media, but in the progressive media. I think it’s quite easy for us to look at the mainstream media and the political bias is clear, the political bias toward conservatism is clear, but I’m not sure that progressive media do that much better than the mainstream media on racial and gender diversity. I just did a quick study, actually it was about a year ago, when I was looking at CommonDreams.org, a very popular progressive website, and I just decided to take a look at five days of the stories that they published, about sixty-one stories, and just did a little bit of statistical analysis, and what I found was shocking. Their writers were of eighty-four point five percent white and seventy-two point four percent male, and I’m wondering if at any point Media Matters has compared racial and gender diversity between mainstream media and alternative media; and I should say that even on Uprising it is a difficult thing for us to try to increase our gender and racial diversity, although we try to be as conscious of it as possible. There are plenty of shows on Pacifica and plenty of other news outlets in the progressive media that I’m not sure are doing that much better.

Waldman: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, and we haven’t done a quantitative analysis of this, but I think that your analysis of what went on on Common Dreams is probably not unrepresentative. And I know of somebody who writes for progressive publications, and this is something that people at these publications are very concerned about, and are thinking about trying to find ways to create more opportunities for people, so that they open up those doors a little bit, and they get a better representation. But I think that that is absolutely something that progressive media need to look at, and the real tough question is, once you’ve decided that you want to do something about it, what exactly do you do. We did this study about the cable networks in part because if they want to fix that problem it’s pretty easy. When you’re talking about booking someone to come on to a cable news show and comment on the news of the day, you know you don’t have to search far and wide. It’s not that hard to do.

Sonali: Well, they certainly have bigger staffs and bigger budgets.

Waldman: They absolutely do, but when you’re talking about a small publication, you know, maybe it’s a website or a magazine, that wants to get a more diverse group of writers there, they may have to kind of look far and wide to get that more diverse group, and so it will take more effort; but the first step is to make a decision that yes, this is something that we want to address. Now as I said, I certainly know that it’s something that people think about in the world of the progressive media. I don’t know what sorts of organized efforts they’ve undertaken to fix the problem. That’s the real question.

Sonali: Well, that’s a really good question. That’s a good question in terms of what efforts they’ve taken from having attended many media conferences, some conferences of women in media. This is a discussion that happens, and the response given by many progressive news outlets is that, well, they don’t really know or they don’t get enough submissions, or they don’t, just don’t have the time or the staff. But I think that if progressive news outlets are going to point fingers at the mainstream media, that we’ve certainly got to do a better job; and perhaps your next study can compare and take a look at our own media and how it does compare to mainstream media.

Waldman: Yeah, that’s a great idea.

Special thanks to Daniel Kolendowicz for transcribing this interview