Sunday Shutout: The Lack of Gender & Ethnic Diversity on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows
Not only are the Sunday morning talk shows on the broadcast networks dominated by conservative opinion and commentary, the four programs -- NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday -- feature guest lists that are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.
And the top-rated Sunday show -- Meet the Press -- shows the least diversity of all. The NBC program is the most male and nearly the most white (Face the Nation beats it out by 1 percentage point), and it has the highest proportion of white males to all other guests.
A breakdown of the guests who appeared on the Sunday shows in 2005 and 2006 shows that men dominate these shows. In fact, men outnumber women by a 4-to-1 ratio on average.
The divide is even starker when it comes to race/ethnicity: On average, there were nearly seven white guests for every guest of any other race/ethnicity. On Meet the Press and Face the Nation, there were nearly nine white guests for every guest of another race/ethnicity.
Fox News Sunday and This Week have a slightly higher degree of diversity than the other two programs, which are virtually identical. This Week's higher proportion of Asian-Americans can be attributed to the frequent appearances of Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria in the program's roundtable discussion. Fox News Sunday's higher proportion of African-Americans can be attributed to the weekly appearance of National Public Radio senior correspondent Juan Williams. (Williams accounted for 99 of the 126 appearances by an African-American on the program during these two years.) Aside from those notable exceptions, approximately nine out of every 10 guests on the Sunday shows are white.
African-Americans are badly underrepresented on the Sunday shows, but Latinos fare even worse. In 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Hispanics made up 14 percent of the American population; given recent rates of growth, the number is undoubtedly higher now. Yet only 1 percent of the guests on the Sunday shows in the past two years were Latino.
In sum, two out of every three guests on the Sunday shows (and three out of every four on Meet the Press) were white men:
In August 2005,* the National Urban League Policy Institute released a study of the Sunday morning talk shows that produced similar results. The institute analyzed the same four programs' guests between January 1, 2004, and June 30, 2005. The study found that "more than 60% of the programs broadcast during the 18-month period studied had no black guests." Additionally, "78% of the broadcasts contained no interviews with black guests," and "fewer than 8% of the guests on these programs have been black." Furthermore, "more than 69% of the appearances by black guests on these programs have been by three people -- Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Juan Williams." The study concluded that "appearances by [black] guests other than Rice, Powell and Williams account for less than 3% of all guest appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows."
For this report, Media Matters went through the entire guest list compiled for the "If It's Sunday, It's Still Conservative" Sunday show report, which updated the original "If It's Sunday, It's Conservative" Sunday show report to include 2005 and 2006. More than 2,150 guests were coded for their gender and race/ethnicity. The race/ethnicity categories were: White, African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and Other. The Other category included Arab-Americans, Iranian-Americans, and all foreign nationals. The White category consists only of white Americans, not white foreign nationals, which therefore means that the results for the White category are slightly less than the actual representation of all whites on the four Sunday programs.
—R.S.
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