The first two articles are from this November, and the 3rd from their 2006 report on NewsHour.
Taking the Public Out of Public TVFAIR decided to examine the guestlists of the shows last fall..when PBS was cancelling Now and Bill Moyers was retiring from Bill Moyers Journal. They replaced them with Need to Know.
Need to Know. FAIR's study of the first three months of Need to Know's guestlist and segments finds that its "record so far provides little encouragement that it will ever serve as an adequate replacement for Now and the Bill Moyers Journal."
The program's heavily white (78 percent) and male (70 percent) guestlist failed to "break out of the narrow corporate media box." Corporate representatives outnumbered activists 20 to 12. And black people appeared overwhelmingly on stories on drugs and prisons.
And some statistic about the NewsHour guests:
The NewsHour's guestlist was 80 percent male and 82 percent white, with a pronounced tilt toward elites who rarely "go unheard," like current and former government and military officials, corporate representatives and journalists (74 percent). Since 2006, appearances by women of color actually decreased by a third, to only 4 percent of U.S. sources.
-- Viewers were five times as likely to see guests representing corporations (10 percent v. 2 percent) than representatives of public interest groups who might counterweigh such moneyed interests--labor, consumer and environmental organizations.
They also have at the website a separate study of the NewsHour.
Does NewsHour ‘Help Us See America Whole’?This one is quite long and hard to just choose a few excerpts.
The NewsHour’s five most frequent individual sources all came from these elite categories: Government officials President Barack Obama (34 appearances), Admiral Allen (17) of the U.S. Coast Guard and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (10), corporate officer Doug Suttles (11) of BP and journalist Marcia Coyle (10) of the National Law Journal. With the exception of Coyle, these sources appeared primarily in taped segments.
Among guests in live segments, journalists dominated the ranks. The top guests in live segments were Coyle (with 10 appearances, she was the only source to appear in the top five live segments in both the 2006 and current studies), Mark Shields of NewsHour (8), David Brooks of the New York Times (8) and Amy Walters of NPR (4). Dan Balz of the Washington Post tied for fifth place with the most frequently appearing non-journalist, Admiral Allen; Balz and Allen each had three live appearances.
..."Public voices
Public interest advocates—sources representing civil rights, labor, consumer, environmental and other citizen-based advocacy groups—provided just 4 percent of the NewsHour’s guests (43 appearances). Despite their comparatively few numbers, these sources represented a range of perspectives, from environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation, international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and conservative advocacy organizations including Freedom Works and the National Rifle Association. With 13 sources, human rights/humanitarian groups were the largest subset of public interest groups. Representatives of environmental organizations were the next largest subset, with 10 appearances.
The issues covered were interesting reading.
BP Oil Spill
More segments (54) were dedicated to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico than to any other story in the study period—roughly one out of every five segments. Corporate sources (ranging from multinationals to small businesses) accounted for 18 percent of the total, while sources representing environmental organizations made up just 3 percent of appearances. Testimony from BP and other oil companies accounted for 13 percent, meaning viewers were over four times more likely to hear from an oil industry representative than someone representing environmental organizations. Though dramatically unbalanced, these numbers are an improvement compared with NewsHour’s coverage of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, in which not a single environmentalist was featured in the seven spill segments reviewed in FAIR’s 1990 study (Extra!, Winter/90).
Some interesting paragraphs from the 2006 study by FAIR of NewsHour:
PBS flagship news show fails public missionIn 2005, Kenneth Tomlinson, chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—and thus the person in charge of disbursing federal public broadcasting funds—sparked controversy with his aggressive push to move PBS and NPR to the right. In a series of public statements, Tomlinson, armed with a dubious study of PBS shows he commissioned from a right-wing ideologue, charged public broadcasting programming with harboring a liberal bias (Extra!, 9–10/05). The study—which, among other things, classified conservative Republicans Sen. Chuck Hagel and former Rep. Bob Barr as “liberals” (Washington Post, 7/1/05)—was primarily an attack on the program Now, formerly hosted by Bill Moyers, and led Tomlinson to fund two new (and short-lived) conservative shows for PBS: the Journal Editorial Report, a TV version of the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial page, and Unfiltered, hosted by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.
At the same time, though, Tomlinson singled out PBS’s flagship news program, the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, as a beacon of balance, telling a July 11, 2005 Senate hearing: “Well, certainly in terms of the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, there is no balance problem. That is great journalism” (Democracy Now!, 7/12/05). Tomlinson’s tribute echoed earlier praise of the show by the National Conservative Political Action Conference, which in 1987 declared what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour “the most balanced network news show” (Extra!, 10–11/89). The CPB’s ombud, Ken Bode, a former PBS host and current fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, similarly lauded the NewsHour’s balance (CPB.org, 9/1/05): “On PBS, the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer is the mothership of balance. It has been criticized most often for going too far out of its way to provide both (or many) points of view.”
FAIR then provided facts about the balance of guests. Very long study, just picking a few paragraphs.
One might expect public interest advocates—sources representing civil rights, labor, consumer, environmental and other citizen-based advocacy groups—to be well-represented on public broadcasting. But such groups, which ranged from progressive groups like the NAACP and Greenpeace to the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform and Concerned Women for America*—provided just 4 percent of NewsHour’s guests (93 guests). With 28 sources, or 1 percent of the total, the human rights/humanitarian classification was the largest among public interests groups. Civil rights was the next largest category, with 15 guests.
The section about the coverage of the Iraq War in 2003 was interesting.
The Iraq War was the most frequently featured subject on the NewsHour, with 81 segments and 276 sources. Despite the wide-ranging and international implications of the war, the discussion on the NewsHour was quite circumscribed. White men from the United States dominated the debate with 66 percent of all sources; Iraqi sources accounted for only 15 percent, and voices from other countries barely registered, at 3 percent. Among U.S. sources, 88 percent were white and 90 percent were men.
Current and former U.S. government and military officials constituted 57 percent of all sources, and journalists made up 15 percent. In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq. The sole public interest voice was from the Washington Kurdish Institute (10/14/05); Rend al-Rahim Francke also appeared on the NewsHour (1/20/06) as head of the Iraq Foundation, but her service as Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. under Iraq’s first interim government classified her as a former foreign official.
And this telling paragraph from the 2006 report.
At the beginning of the Iraq War, a FAIR study (Extra!, 5–6/03) of six national news shows including the NewsHour found that they featured war supporters almost 24 times as often as war critics: 71 percent of sources took an explicit pro-war stance, vs. 3 percent expressing opposition. Despite PBS’s mandate to offer an alternative to commercial media, the NewsHour in that study fell closely in line with its commercial competition, with 66 percent pro-war sources vs. 3 percent antiwar.
One interesting thing in yet another FAIR report, this one an activism request.
When Jon Meacham of Newsweek was chosen co-host, they spoke out. Some interesting bits in the activism request.
PBS to Replace Moyers, NOW With Newsweek Editor?Meacham is a fixture on commercial pundit shows in addition to his Newsweek duties. In these venues, he is a consummate purveyor of middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom with a conservative slant. After the 2008 election, Meacham (10/27/08) authored an article on America as a "center-right nation"--a conclusion based on dubious historical analogies (Sarah Palin is a kind of Thomas Jefferson) and cherry-picking national election results, casting aside evidence that would undermine the conclusion (FAIR Blog, 10/19/08).
He recently (FAIR Blog, 11/30/09) cheered on a Dick Cheney presidential run as "good for the Republicans and good for the country." Meacham had just months earlier (FAIR Blog, 1/12/09) argued that any critical investigations into the Bush/Cheney record on torture would be pointless ("the rough equivalent of pornography," as he put it).
Meacham's approach to journalism seems to be antithetical to the hard-hitting approach of Moyers and Now; he's called on journalists to "cover other institutions as you would want to be covered," with "charity and dignity and respect" (Meet the Press, 1/1/06). This Golden Rule approach to news was illustrated when he intervened in a Newsweek online story about Joe Scarborough, a personal friend who often invites Meacham on his cable show, to remove from the lead the fact that Scarborough had served as the defense attorney for the murderer of an abortion provider (FAIR Blog, 6/11/09).
Good research by FAIR, and reminiscent of their 2004 article which pointed out how the conservative to right leaning voices are sent to TV to speak as the left.
I'm Not a Leftist, But I Play One on TVAnd the media still does that shamelessly. We have maybe 2 or 3 voices on one major network we can honestly claim as from the left.
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