"Are You on the NewsHour's Guestlist?" It's a FAIR Question.
Ken A. Bode
October 31, 2006
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is the progressive media watchdog organization that regularly releases reports on corporate media. Recently it produced one of its periodic reports on public broadcasting, focused this time entirely on The NewsHour. The analysis, bearing the title, "Are you on the NewsHour's Guestlist," makes the point that sources and voices on the PBS flagship news program represents a narrow spectrum of particularly privileged elite occupations, dominated by current and former government officials.
No one at the NewsHour questioned FAIR's statistics or its reporting. Linda Winslow, the program's executive producer, had this comment to the PBS house organ, Current: "FAIR seems to be accusing us of covering the people who make decisions that affect people's lives, many of whom work in government, the military or corporate America. That's what we do. We're a news program and that's who makes news."
The FAIR study spanned a 6-month period from October 2005 through March 2006, and included every on air NewsHour source, live or taped. Let's look a some of FAIR's findings:
Current and former government officials, including the military, constituted 50 percent of the total NewsHour guests, with journalists, academics, think-tankers and corporate guests rounding out the top five categories. FAIR labels this "elite sources." This ratio is consistent with the organization's earlier 1990 study of the NewsHour when 49 percent of all sources fell into this category. These, obviously, are the newsmakers referred to by executive producer Winslow.
At the other end of the spectrum, public interest advocates -- sources representing civil rights, labor, consumer, environmental and other citizen based advocacy groups -- represented just four percent of NewsHour guests. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been constant subjects on the program over the past few years. However, in the six months covered by the FAIR study, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq.
In that regard, not much has changed since a two-month study undertaken by FAIR in 2003, at the beginning of the war in Iraq. Then the NewsHour presented 71 percent pro-war sources compared to three percent anti-war. In the current study, those arguing against withdrawal of troops outnumbered the pro-withdrawal sources 5-to-one. Among live guests, the imbalance grew to more than 10-to-1.
Now a look at demography. The FAIR study found, predictably, that women were substantially underrepresented, constituting only 18 percent of all sources, up from 15 percent in the previous study. Nearly one-third of the women who appeared on the program were "general public" sources, not appearing as experts. On the NewsHour, Gwen Ifill and Margaret Carlson deliver the news, but women don't make it. Once again, this statistic reflects Linda Winslow's assertion that the program covers the people who make the decisions.
Of the NewsHour sources from the US, 85 percent were white; nearly three-quarters of all US sources were white males. In the six-month period covered by the study, nearly half of all African-American sources were featured as part of the program's coverage of Hurricane Katrina, many of them victims, not experts.
Two Bush Administration officials were highly ranked in their ethnic categories. Sec of State Condoleezza Rice appeared 21 times, accounting for 13 percent of all African American sources. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared 11 times, or 30 percent of all Latino sources. NewsHour spokesman Rob Flynn makes this point about Gonzales: "He is the most powerful Hispanic in the country. He is in a position to make a huge difference in the way our country operates." The same might be said of Secretary Rice -- she is the most powerful female African American. Obviously both fit the NewsHour's criteria for newsmaker.
Finally, there is a statistic in the most recent FAIR study more lopsided than I would have expected from my nightly viewing. It is that Republicans outnumbered Democrats as principal sources by 2-to-1. Some of this is due to sound clips from President Bush, which ran in the opening news summary or to set up discussions. There were also clips from the White House press secretary used for the same purpose. Still, the imbalance is troubling, though it is certainly one reason for FAIR's conclusion that PBS, as a whole, does not lean to the left.
FAIR has a history of examining what it calls "elite tendencies" in both corporate and public broadcasting. In a way, this study installs the NewsHour as the elite of the elite. At its essence, part of the program's coverage of news is that it allows America to hear directly from inside the innermost circles of influence. Sometimes even loyal PBS viewers perceive that there may be a price for it's success in this mission, with Jim Lehrer's obvious softball treatment in his Q & A session with Vice President Cheney being the most contemporaneous example.
It is pretty commonly accepted that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the press was soft on the Bush Administration, failing or unable to dig beneath the intelligence estimates used to justify the war and too willingly accepting, even promoting, the Administration's arguments on the necessity of going to war. The New York Times and The Washington Post both examined their news and editorial coverage leading to the Congressional vote authorizing Iraq. Each concluded systematic shortcomings. How would the NewsHour's coverage stand up to a similar examination?
What was the record of the NewsHour in the run-up to the war? FAIR's earlier study showed that when the decision about whether to invade Iraq was still on the table, anti-war voices on the program were buried 71 percent to 3 percent by pro-war advocates. At a time when Congress was being cowed into support for the war, the NewsHour followed its normal pattern of having very few voices from the average public, and war supporters were featured 24 times as often as war critics.
In the current study, FAIR found Iraq to be the most frequently featured subject on the NewsHour at a time when Republican sources on the program outnumbered Democrats 2-to-1. Along with Iraq, national security policies involving imprisonment, torture and wiretapping were being discussed. Among the most frequent guests were high-ranking, authoritative Administration defenders, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.
It might be interesting for CPB to commission a journalism school to undertake a systematic study of the balance in the coverage by the NewsHour of the war in Iraq and related issues. I have said before that I consider the NewsHour as "the mother ship of balance," but I own up to the suspicion that regarding Iraq, I may be wrong.
On the subject of whose voices are heard, it's good to remember the language that originally set the standard. "Public broadcasting should provide a voice for the groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard . . . (and) help us see America whole in all its diversity." This is particularly true when issues of war and peace are on the national agenda. I come away with the feeling that the folks at the NewsHour shouldn't seem so reflexively dismissive of the criticism this time. Under scrutiny, their record on early Iraq coverage may not bear up so well.
Tavis Smiley, a radio and TV host on PBS and a prominent black presence on the network, expressed some interesting thoughts recently in Current. His essay, titled, "Can't We Welcome New People to the Club," urged public broadcasting to "get out of its comfort zone." Smiley continued, "I think for the most part public broadcasting does a decent job of creating and ensuring ideological balance in programming. That means including the voices from the two dominant political parties in most discussions. But, of course, since those political voices are mostly white, mostly male, mostly Protestant and mostly from the Ivy League, there's a whole lot that we are missing. Until public broadcasting can get past a structure that favors the academic elite, it will always be too exclusive in its tone."
Tavis Smiley is a voice from within the public broadcasting family that bears heeding.
