Rachel Maddow's MSNBC Show is the 'Whitest and Malest Show' in Cable News — Survey

Who Gets to Speak on Cable News?: The identity of the whitest, malest show we found may surprise you.

All In With Chris Hayes had the most ethnically diverse guestlist we found on cable
news.

By Peter Hart
A survey of major cable news discussion programs shows a stunning lack of diversity among the guests.

FAIR surveyed five weeks of broadcasts of the interview/discussion segments on several leading one-hour cable shows: CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° and OutFront With Erin Burnett, All In With Chris Hayes and the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor and Hannity.

Guests were coded by gender, race/ethnicity and occupation, as well as the affiliations of partisan guests-those who are identified with a party as current or former government officials or campaign professionals.

Data was collected during the first two weeks of February, the first week of March and the first two weeks of April. (Fewer weeks were monitored in March to limit the distorting effects of the singular focus on the missing Malaysian plane story.) Guests who appeared in interview or roundtable segments were the only appearances that were included; taped segments, which normally include a correspondent and soundbites from various guests, were excluded.

In total, there were 1,015 guests in the five-week period. Maddow was an outlier with only 49 guests during the study period; the other shows ranged from All In with 164 to AC360 and OutFront, both with 212.

Among guests with a partisan affiliation, Democrats outnumbered Republicans, 104 to 84. That is almost entirely due to the lopsided nature of partisan-identified guests on MSNBC. All In With Chris Hayes had a 35-7 advantage for Democrats, while Rachel Maddow had 12 Democrats to two Republicans.

Fox News Channel, as you might expect, featured more Republicans than Democrats, but the GOP enjoyed a more modest advantage: 24-15 on the O'Reilly Factor and 29-21 on Hannity. Many of the Democrats appearing on Fox News are what one might call "Fox News Democrats" (Extra!, 3/12), people like Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckel and Lanny Davis, who often represent a center-right faction of the party and are called on to bash more progressive Democrats.

The largest category of guests were other members of the media: 55 percent of the guests were either journalists (400) or pundits (159). Current and former government officials were the next largest category, accounting for almost 10 percent of guests (107). There were 37 military guests (current and former), 35 representatives of think tanks and 32 academics. Other prominent guest categories were lawyers (21) and business representatives (17).

Some patterns were a function of the study period. Fifteen guests were affiliated with the Bundy ranch standoff, when a conservative rancher decided to protest having to pay to graze his cattle on federal land. All of those guests appeared on the Hannity show. CNN’s obsessive coverage of the disappeared Malaysian airplane was evident in their programming in March, which featured pilots, aviation experts and scientists who would normally not appear on cable chat shows.

Eighty-four percent of guests were white (848). The most and least diverse shows in terms of ethnicity were both on MSNBC: People of color were 27 percent of guests on All In and only 6 percent on Maddow. Just three of Maddow’s guests were people of color; none of these were women.

Hayes' previous show, the weekend Up With Chris Hayes, had been credited for presenting more diverse discussions than other programs, particularly the Sunday morning chat shows (Media Matters, 3/14/13). Hayes explained (CJR.org, 3/28/13) that it was simply a matter of monitoring the show's guest list: "A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men."

The Fox News shows were also mostly white, with people of color constituting 10 percent of the guests on O'Reilly and 15 percent on Hannity. On CNN, AC360's guest list was 14 percent people of color, and OutFront (19 percent) was slightly better.

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People of color constitute about 36 percent of the US population. On All In, the show that came closest to parity, there were 76 percent as many people of color as there would have been if the sources had matched the nation’s demographics. By comparison, people of color appeared 53 percent as much as their demographic proportion on OutFront, 39 percent on AC360, 42 percent on Hannity and 29 percent on O’Reilly. On Maddow, people of color were represented just 17 percent as often as they occur in the general public.

Latinos—who make up 16 percent of the US population—were particularly underrepresented on cable, with only 31 appearances (3 percent of sources) in the study. Eight of these appearances, more than a quarter of the total, were by CNN contributor Sunny Hostin on AC360; only four other Latino women appeared across all six shows. The diversity of Latino voices was even further diminished on Fox, where five of the seven Latino guest appearances were made by Fox personality Geraldo Rivera.

Male guests widely outnumbered women on every show (730 to 285), making up 72 percent of the guest lists. Just 5 percent (46) of cable news guests were women of color.

The show closest to gender parity was the O’Reilly Factor, where women were 36 percent of guests, followed by Hannity, also on Fox, with 35 percent women. However, all but one of O’Reilly’s female guests were white; Hannity had only four women of color on his show. This pattern is related to the phenomenon of the “Fox News blonde,” the young, attractive female guests who are regulars on both shows; they’re not actually all blonde, but they are almost uniformly white  (SteveDennie.com, 1/26/12).

CNN's Erin Burnett had the most male-dominated guest list, with only 19 percent female guests. All In was 28 percent female, while Maddow and AC360's guests were both 25 percent women.
With women making up about 51 percent of the US population, they got 72 percent of their demographic share on the O'Reilly Factor, 69 percent on Hannity, 55 percent on All In, 48 percent on both Maddow and AC360, and only 37 percent on OutFront.

Women of color (about 18 percent of the US public) were strikingly underrepresented on most shows, getting 34 percent of their demographic share on AC360, 26 percent on OutFront, 11 percent on Hannity and 3 percent on the O'Reilly Factor. Maddow, again, had no women of color as guests during the study period. All In came closest to parity, with women of color at 60 percent of their demographic share.

Non-Latino white men, on the other hand, were overrepresented on every show. The Fox News shows had the least overrepresentation, with white men appearing 162 percent as much as they do in the general public on Hannity, and 167 percent on the O'Reilly Factor. Next came All In, where white men had 175 percent of their proportion of the public. White men appeared a little more than twice as often as their demographic share on Out Front (209 percent), AC360 (210 percent) and Maddow (213 percent).

Research assistance by Sara Qureshi and Aldo Guerrero.

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SIDEBAR:

Alternative Media: How Alternative Is It?

FAIR thought it would be interesting to contrast the elite dominance of these cable shows with an independent outlet: Democracy Now!, the daily TV/radio broadcast heard on hundreds of affiliate stations. The structure of the show is in some respects very similar to cable news programming, with long-form interviews, debates and panel discussions. But the show is perhaps best known for featuring experts and analysis that are rarely heard in the corporate media.

So how did Democracy Now! stack up against corporate-owned cable news? The show interviewed only two former or current government officials, and featured far more guests who were activists—27 percent. The most common category of guests, as on cable, was journalists, but many of these were drawn from independent/alternative media, a type of reporter seldom seen on cable news.


The guest list during the study period was 79 percent white—66 of the 84 guests—better than the cable average, but still bested by All In. Latinos were 8 percent of the guests (seven appearances), African-Americans 6 percent (five guests). Overall, people of color were represented 67 percent as much as they appear in the general public.

Women were 40 percent of the show's guests, making DN! closer to parity than any of the cable shows studied. This was 79 percent of their proportion of the public.

White men were overrepresented on Democracy Now!, but at a lower rate—148 percent of their demographic share—than on any of the cable news shows we looked at. Women of color were underrepresented, appearing 53 percent as often as their proportion of the public—more than most of the cable shows, but behind All In.

We also looked at the diversity of the guestlist on FAIR's CounterSpin radio program. Because it's a weekly show with usually only two guests per episode, we looked at a longer time frame: the first five months of 2014, during which the show featured 41 guests.

CounterSpin's 20 female guests gave it 95 percent parity with women in the general public, and the 14 people of color interviewed represented 93 percent of their demographic share. Women of color, with six guests, were 86 percent of demographic parity. The 13 white men the show featured exactly matched the white male proportion of the population. -P.H.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Fox News Has Finally Yelled Fire in a Crowded Theater — Show Host, Sean Hannity, Continues To Egg On Right-Wing Extremists

Frazier Glenn Cross was charged with killing three people during an attack on Jewish-affiliated facilities in Kansas
City, KS - April 13, 2014. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By The Daily Take Team (Truthout), The Thom Hartmann Program
There were two terrorist attacks in America over the weekend, but don't expect the mainstream media to call them that.

On Friday, 48-year-old Georgia resident Dennis Marx was scheduled to appear at the Forsyth County Courthouse in Cumming, Georgia, to face charges on 11 different felony counts.

Marx arrived at the courthouse on-time, but while in his truck, he threw "homemade spike strips" onto the road, and tried to run over a policeman.

After police opened fire on him, Marx began shooting at them from his truck, and proceeded to throw tear gas grenades, smoke grenades, and pepper spray grenades at them.

After a three minute long firefight, a SWAT team surrounded Marx, ultimately killing him.

Meanwhile, yesterday in Las Vegas, an armed couple screaming about "revolution" opened fire and killed two Las Vegas policemen inside of a local pizza joint.

After shooting and killing Officer Alyn Beck and Officer Igor Soldo, the couple took their weapons and covered their bodies with the Gadsden Flag, a yellow banner with contains a coiled snake around the words, "Don't tread on me."

The flag is named for Christopher Gadsden, the Revolutionary War general who designed it. It's also a very popular symbol with the Tea Party movement.

After killing the police officers, the couple then fled to a local Walmart, where they killed an innocent bystander, before ultimately taking their own lives in an apparent murder-suicide.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, neighbors said the couple often spoke about mistrust for and killing of police officers, and "going underground" until the time was right.

Neighbors also told the Review-Journal that the husband claimed he had been kicked off the Bundy Ranch during the protests there last month.

And back in April, Frazier Glenn Miller, a well-known right-wing extremist and member of the KKK, shoot and killed 14-year-old boy and his grandfather at a Jewish Community Center near Kansas City.

Miller then drove to a Jewish retirement home, and killed another person.

As police arrested him, Miller screamed out "Heil Hitler."

Frazier Glenn Miller, Dennis Marx and the Las Vegas shooters were right-wing extremists and domestic terrorists. It's that simple.

Unfortunately, the media refuses to acknowledge right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism in our country, even though they pose a bigger threat to our national security than jihadists and Islamic extremists.

According to the New America Foundation, as of April of this year, 21 people had been killed in the United States in attacks motivated by Islamic extremism since 9/11.

Meanwhile, 34 people had been killed by right-wing extremist attacks during the same time period.

The fact is, right-wing extremism is on the rise, it's dangerous, and it's now a major terrorist force in America.

Right-wing extremist and militia groups aren't the fringe groups they used to be - now Fox so-called News makes members of these groups like the ones who showed up at the Bundy Ranch into media stars and heroes.

But while the facts speak for themselves, the mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, The New York Times etc...) refuses to acknowledge the truth.

Can you imagine how outraged the media would be right now if Dennis Marx had been a 48-year-old brown Muslim guy?

Fox So-Called News would be calling for heads to roll if the Las Vegas shooters had been a Muslim couple.

And, news coverage would've been wall-to-wall if Frazier Glenn Miller had screamed out "Allah Akbar" instead of "Heil Hitler."

Instead, you have Conservative pundits like Sean Hannity running around, arguably egging on right-wing extremists.

In the nearly 13 years since 9/11, al Qaeda has not successfully pulled off another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

But right-wing extremists have.

The first step to solving a problem is always being able to admit that you have it.

It's time for the media to start calling attacks like those in Las Vegas, Cumming, Georgia, and Kansas City what they are: right-wing-extremist-fueled terrorist attacks.

Reprinted with permission from Truthout.

Sean Hannity and Neo Nazis: Hannity Was 'Cozy' With Notorious Neo-Nazi Hal Turner Back When Hannity Was A Fledgling Right-Winger

Sean Hannity (left) and the notorious neo-Nazi (and FBI informant) Hal Turner. (Left Photo - YouTube; Right Photo - CT
State Capitol Police)

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, neocons, Tea Partiers, militia members—just to name a few—have called their adversaries, and especially the Obama Administration, everything from fascists, murderers, dictators, cowards, communist, nappy headed hos, sluts, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. But they have perhaps escaped the only label that rings true for them: "Neo-Nazis."  —Ronald David Jackson

By MARK KARLIN
If you have been watching Jon Stewart lately, you have had the pleasure of witnessing a series of withering attacks on Sean Hannity's hypocrisy. Furthermore, BuzzFlash (for many years) and Stewart have both sniffed the simmering racism of Hannity and FOX. Yes, it's a coded racism, but it's there - lingering in the smirk of his smug lacerating comments about liberals - and is a strong magnet of attraction to the aged, largely white male, viewing base of FOX.

This came to the forefront again with Hannity's strong support for Cliven Bundy, until Bundy openly expressed his racism - thus breaking the tacit understanding of Hannity, FOX and their viewers to never publicly disclose their bigotry. Racism on FOX (along with its bigoted cousin: "multiculturalism is destroying the United States") is a primary attraction of the program to its watchers who see white entitlement slipping from their hands. However, it is never to be openly acknowleged -- and even officially renounced if necessary, as Hannity did when he had to walk back his embrace of Bundy after the rancher channeled the opinions of a plantation slave owner on video.

As Jon Stewart pointed out, Hannity is always attacking President Obama and liberals for allegedly selectively applying the law, but when it comes to white male gun loving racists like Bundy (and anyone watching what happened before Bundy's followers threatened law enforcement officers with guns knew that racism and anti-big government sedition fit together like a hand in a kid glove), Hannity gives enormous latitude to white males who express anti-government sentiments, even when their firearms are pointed at Hannity's beloved police.

It is important to note, yet again, that the Nevada state Constitution designates as federal property, by law, the land Cliven Bundy has been using for grazing his cattle on. Around 15,000 ranchers pay the US goverment Bureau of Land Management for the right to have their cows eat and roam on US land. But Bundy wants welfare for his cattle, so he has broken Nevada and federal laws and now owes the US government over a million dollars.

You could call Cliven Bundy Sean Hannity's "Welfare King."

But let's return to the racial underpinnings of much of the FOX and Hannity "frame" on culture and politics in the US.

Several years ago, BuzzFlash noted that while Hannity was daily trying to make Obama into a black panther radical during the 2008 election campaign, the author Max Blumenthal had charged Hannity with being quite cozy with neo-Nazi Hal Turner when Hannity was starting out as a right-wing radio talk show host.

We wrote about these charges and evidence to seemingly back them up on BuzzFlash at the time, but due to a server move, those commentaries are not currently available.

However, an indispensible web site, "News Hounds: We watch Fox so you don't have to," reported on the allegations in a March 23, 2008, entry, "Neo Nazi/White Supremacist Hal Turner Confirms Friendship And Kinship With Sean Hannity":

Earlier in the week, Sean Hannity denied, albeit in contradictory terms, ever having a relationship with neo Nazi/white supremacist Hal Turner. As I posted the night Hannity was confronted about Turner, the evidence conflicts with Hanniy’s claims. Now Turner has confirmed their friendship and their sympatico views in a blog post called, “About Sean Hannity and Me. . . . . Yes, we were friends and yes, Sean agreed with some of my views.”

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