Archives: Media Ownership

The National Urban League recently released a report (PDF) entitled, "Sunday Morning Apartheid: A Diversity Study of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows," which presented the results of an 18-month study of political talk shows on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC.  The report, which examined Sunday morning political talk shows because they "play a unique and substantial role in the political discourse in America," provides more compelling evidence of the failure of the media industry to meet the governmental mandate of “diversity, localism and competition” in programming.

Among the findings of the report were the following:

• African-Americans accounted for only 8% of the more than 2100 guest appearances on the shows during the period between January 1, 2004 and June 30, 2005.
• Condileeza Rice, Colin Powell and Juan Wiliams accounted for 122 (or 69%) of the 175 guest appearances which included African-Americans.
• More than 60% of the programs during the period had featured zero African-American guests.

The study also points out that these talk shows wield tremendous power in influencing national policy debate, as well as determining which voices will be considered experts on a given issue.  The glaring absence of African-American voices in general, and a diversity of African-American voices, in particular deprives our society of information and points of view that are necessary to form a complete picture of the issues at stake for all of us. 

To learn more about the role that media ownership plays in programming diversity, see What’s at Stake: Minority Ownership and Media Ownership.