Labor Almost Invisible on TV Talk: Sunday Chat Shows Skip Worker Representatives

By FAIR
As the Labor Day holiday approaches, ask yourself how often you see unions represented on corporate-owned television. On the highest-profile public affairs shows, the answer is basically never.
According to a search of the Sunday morning talkshows for this year (January-August), not a single representative of a labor union appeared on any of the four network programs (NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CBS's Face the Nation).

Ironically, the one union leader discussed substantively on any of the programs was Ronald Reagan, the famously anti-union former president. He came up as an answer in an ABC "Powerhouse Puzzlers" quiz (3/2/14) as the only president to have headed a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild.

And it's not that the shows couldn't have used a voice for working people. While normally preoccupied with Beltway politics, these shows touched on issues like poverty, jobs and workers' rights. There were even discussions of efforts to organize college athletes (Meet the Press, 3/23/14; Face the Nation, 3/30/14).

Ronald Reagan was the only labor leader mentioned on the Sunday
morning chat shows this year.

But representatives of organized labor were not part of these conversations. The closest labor came to the Sunday chat show circuit was when Meet the Press (6/29/14) aired an excerpt of a Clinton Foundation event that included two quotes from Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union, which is not a certified union but a nonprofit organization that brokers health insurance for independent workers.

The Sunday shows did, however, find time to hear the views of corporate America. Guests that were identified as current or former corporate CEOs made 12 appearances, including former AOL head Steve Case (Meet the Press, 4/6/14), Apple CEO Tim Cook (This Week, 3/30/14) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (Fox News Sunday, 6/22/14). Former Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican political candidate Carly Fiorina made four appearances.

Introducing a segment with FedEx chair Frederick W. Smith and former UBS Investment Bank chief Robert Wolf, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace (5/4/14) announced:

We got a lot of numbers about the economy this week, but not a clear picture of where we stand. To help sort it out, we brought in two of America's leading business executives.

None of the Sunday show hosts were ever similarly moved to bring in any of America's leading labor representatives to give us a clearer picture of where we stand.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Still Mostly Male and White: Sunday Morrning Political Talkshows - Like The Tea Party, These TV Producers REFUSE To Adapt To A Changing America

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The sneakiest kind of censorship: The racial and sexual kind.

By ROB SAVILLO

A Media Matters review of the Sunday morning political talk shows finds that white males largely dominated the guest lists in 2013. MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry and Up with Steve Kornacki achieved greater ethnic and gender diversity than the broadcast shows or CNN's State of the Union. Overall, conservatives outnumbered progressives on the four broadcast Sunday morning shows.

 

Throughout 2013, Media Matters has analyzed guest appearances on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CBS' Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, NBC's Meet the Press with David Gregory, CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley, and MSNBC's Up with Steve Kornacki and Melissa Harris-Perry, political talk shows that often set the media and political agenda. Media Matters has previously released analyses of the first, second, and third quarters of the year. This item will be updated as Media Matters releases additional analysis of the 2013 gender, ethnicity, and ideological demographics of the guests.

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