More old white guy liberal media bias
If you look to the Sunday morning TV talkers to get a pulse of the nation's news, know that your view is skewed. Yeah, it's that old white guy liberal slant.
Media Matters, once again, has come out with a study that should shock people for its obviousness: On Sunday morning TV talk shows that reportedly give you straight news, you're getting one phenomenally biased point of view. And that view is overwhelmingly white and male.
It's something you could probably watch a few times and know anecdotally, but the numbers are staggering. Face the Nation, the worst performer of the bunch, checks in with 90% of their guests being white, and of those, 80% are male. Fox News Sunday has some interesting stats, too, regarding race.
When interviewing black guests for example (which they do 16% of the time — higher than anybody else; read on), they tend to use their own back yard quite a bit. Over the course of the two year study, Fox News Sunday interviewed 126 black guests, 99 of which were Juan Williams. The other two were Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell. If this weren't tragic, it would be hysterically funny.
And as bad as African Americans fared in this study, Hispanics and Asian Americans did even worse, representing about 1% of the guests on these shows. Women were outnumbered 4 to 1.
In short, even on weekends, the message is still conservative, it's still being controlled by rich white men, and the concept of a "liberal media" - let alone a liberal media bias—is an abject myth. Year after year, study after study proves this, but you will hear the phrases and key words spewing like fresh effluent from O'Reilly and Limbaugh: The liberal media.
Media Matters, once again, has come out with a study that should shock people for its obviousness: On Sunday morning TV talk shows that reportedly give you straight news, you're getting one phenomenally biased point of view. And that view is overwhelmingly white and male.
It's something you could probably watch a few times and know anecdotally, but the numbers are staggering. Face the Nation, the worst performer of the bunch, checks in with 90% of their guests being white, and of those, 80% are male. Fox News Sunday has some interesting stats, too, regarding race.
When interviewing black guests for example (which they do 16% of the time — higher than anybody else; read on), they tend to use their own back yard quite a bit. Over the course of the two year study, Fox News Sunday interviewed 126 black guests, 99 of which were Juan Williams. The other two were Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell. If this weren't tragic, it would be hysterically funny.
And as bad as African Americans fared in this study, Hispanics and Asian Americans did even worse, representing about 1% of the guests on these shows. Women were outnumbered 4 to 1.
In short, even on weekends, the message is still conservative, it's still being controlled by rich white men, and the concept of a "liberal media" - let alone a liberal media bias—is an abject myth. Year after year, study after study proves this, but you will hear the phrases and key words spewing like fresh effluent from O'Reilly and Limbaugh: The liberal media.
