Thursday, April 19, 2012

Sunday Talk Shows: Fairly Unbalanced

Think there's no bias in the Sunday morning talk shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, etc.)? Or if there is, it's liberal bias? From a study on Sunday talk shows by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

"# Of one-on-one interviews, 70 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. Those guests were overwhelmingly male (86 percent) and white (92 percent).

# The broader roundtable segments weren't much more diverse: 62 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. More broadly, guests classified as either Republican or conservative far outnumbered Democrats or progressives, 282 to 164. The roundtables were 71 percent male and 85 percent white."

To those of us who've followed the news for more than half a century, the notion of liberal bias in the media is laughable. Laughable. These "mainstream" programs and the purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom are now, and have long been, wired Rethuglican.