NewsHour’s focus on the powerful ‘fails the public,’ FAIR asserts

Originally published in Current, Oct. 10, 2006
By Steve Behrens

It’s clear by now that NewsHour producers and FAIR, the progressive media watchdog, have quite different notions of what PBS’s main news program should be.

The selection of guests and other sources on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in the watchdog’s latest analysis, is far more white, male and Republican than the public at large. But it’s probably also a close match to the range of heavyweights who actually influence and make the call on federal policies.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which released the study Oct. 4 [2006], says its figures indicate the NewsHour has “utterly failed the public it exists to serve” by restricting the diversity of views it presents.

NewsHour execs quarrel with FAIR’s methodology, which counted news clips of President Bush and his press secretary as sources. But the producers most strongly rebut the idea that a news program should divert its attention from powerful and informed sources to those who are mostly on-lookers.

FAIR’s study reported:

Whites were 85 percent of the program’s U.S. sources and 76 percent of all sources, during FAIR’s six-month survey period, October 2005 through March 2006. African-Americans were 9 percent; Latinos 2 percent. Blacks became 51 percent of sources in New Orleans stories, though FAIR said they were “largely presented as hapless victims rather than leaders or experts.”
Males were 82 percent of sources.
Of partisan sources, 66 percent were Republicans. Of interview guests, the share was 77 percent.

Earlier FAIR studies of sources for the NewsHour in 1990, commercial TV news and NPR News showed similarities, though NPR had notably fewer government sources.

	NewsHour 1990	NewsHour 2006	Commercial network news 2002	NPR News 2004
Government & military officials, U.S. & foreign	49	50	*	31
Male	87	82	85	79
Female	13	18	15	21
White (in U.S. sources)	90	85	92	*
African-American (U.S. sources)	*	9	*	*
Latino (in U.S. sources)	*	2	*	*
Republican	*	66	75	61
Democrat	*	33	24	38

“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,” said Executive Producer Linda Winslow in a statement last week. “That’s what we do. We’re a news program, and that’s who makes news.”

Indeed, 50 percent of sources counted by FAIR were current and former government and military personnel. Most of the rest were journalists (10 percent), academics (8 percent), corporate execs (5 percent), think-tankers (3 percent) and public-interest advocates (4 percent). The general public accounted for 14 percent of appearances.

The program’s focus on the powerful is so tight that appearances by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales amounted to more than 30 percent of all Latino sources in FAIR’s head count. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made 13 percent of the appearances by African-Americans, FAIR said.

Hearing from Gonzales makes news sense to NewsHour spokesman Rob Flynn. “He’s the most powerful Hispanic in the country,” Flynn says. “He is in a position to make a huge difference in the way our country operates.”

Public TV should live up to its mandate to reflect the country’s diversity, Flynn says, but the NewsHour is driven by the news and isn’t primarily a platform for viewpoints. Lehrer and Winslow nevertheless want diversity among guests, he said, and regularly exhort staffers to find new voices. Win-slow’s statement notes with pleasure that women’s share of appearances is up since FAIR’s 1990 study. The share rose from 13 to 18 percent.

By giving most airtime to those in power, the NewsHour is “circumscribing the possibilities” of public debate, says Julie Hollar, coauthor of the FAIR study. In the six months ending in March, for instance, the study said NewsHour coverage of Iraq didn’t include a single peace activist. While polls said about half of the public was favoring withdrawal of U.S. forces, FAIR found that “ ‘stay the course’ sources outnumbered pro-withdrawal sources more than 5-to-1.”

The NewsHour responds to FAIR

The NewsHour released this statement by Executive Producer Linda Winslow:

“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. They also seem to have confused the NewsHour with all of PBS, when it comes to a “mandate” (referred to in the fuller report); the one they’re quoting comes from a 40-year-old Carnegie Commission Report about public broadcasting. We cover the news as fairly and impartially as we can. Period.

“Our mission is to provide information about developments and policy decisions that affect large numbers of Americans. We make it a point to question the decision makers, and when we do we also make it a point to include other views that provide balance and/or a different perspective either in the same program, or one produced soon after. We try to book the most qualified guests we can for every segment; when they are people who work for the government, the military or corporate America, their sex, age, ethnicity and political affiliation reflect decisions made by the people who hired (or voted for) them.

“I have no idea how FAIR arrived at the numbers the report contains, but it sounds like they have included every sound bite we used in the news summary at the top of the program. If not, I have no idea how they determined that we had President Bush on the program 102 times in the six-month period they studied; we interviewed him last December for the first time since he was elected President. He is indeed a Republican, as are the leaders of the House and Senate and most members of the Administration. So if they’re including every sound bite from someone in the government who is making news in their tally, I don’t think it’s surprising that Republicans outnumber Democrats in their “count." I also think that’s a pretty specious argument.

“I’m glad to see the percentage of women guests is improving (again, something that is documented in the full report in comparison to earlier surveys). We have made a concerted effort to improve in this area, and that effort continues. Again, as women move into more decision-making positions in government and business, we expect to see even more of them on the program. The same goes for non-white guests, and I’m glad to see that we’ve also improved there. In fact, it looks to me like we’ve improved in just about every way FAIR could think of to categorize what we do.

“I take issue with the way the FAIR report characterizes each guest, which they have obviously done very subjectively. Witness the trashing of Mark Shields and Tom Oliphant (in the full report), who are not liberal enough for FAIR’s taste. When you get down to arguing about degrees of left-and-rightness, I think you undermine your own argument. They are also inconsistent. They count every Republican sound bite as a sign of imbalance, but at one point they decided to assign more “value” to a studio appearance than one on tape, thereby dismissing the significance of our decision to devote most of our available tape production resources to covering the after-effects of Katrina during this six-month period. That decision makes precisely the opposite point from FAIR’s interpretation.

“Ultimately, as FAIR itself discovered, counting heads on a news program is meaningless unless you also analyze what they are saying. In that sense, this report simply proved that FAIR is quite capable of rendering selective judgments about who, and what, is important and worth listening to.”