MIKE PESCA, host:
As everyone knows, we had a historic Democratic contest, which came down to a white woman and a biracial man. Shorthand is calling Barack Obama a black man, that's fine. It doesn't change my point, which is that TV news coverage of those two was largely conducted by white men. And while CBS, of course, hired Katie Couric to anchor its network newscasts, the near-weekly election roundups were presided over by the likes of Anderson, Wolf, Brit, Keith and Chris. Ari Melber is of the Nation Magazine and its net component, The Notion - cool name.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PESCA: He looks at the media landscape, and he sees white people...
RACHEL MARTIN, host:
Ooh!
PESCA: Especially white male people. Hello, Ari, how are you?
Mr. ARI MELBER (Net Movement Correspondent, The Nation): Good, how're you doing?
PESCA: Let's start off by disclosing - this is radio, people can't see us - I am a white man.
Mr. MELBER: I'm actually a white guy.
PESCA: A white guy?
Mr. MELBER: But it's similar, yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PESCA: It's cooler than being a man. It's like Man Version 2.0.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PESCA: OK, so we have the bona fides, I think, to tackle this topic. Look, the anchormen were anchormen. Ever since Bernie Shaw's retirement, there have been white anchormen. But I noticed that on CNN, on any given night, you typically have like a whole bunch of experts, and the experts were pretty diverse. There was Donna Brazile, and Jamal Simmons, and Amy Holmes, Roland Martin, Alex Castellanos, Leslie Sanchez, Gloria Borger, you know, women. I mean, didn't you see the diversity on the panels?
Mr. MELBER: I did, and part of the point I was making in this article at thenation.com is that there was a brief spike in minority and female representation on these shows that have been the real province of white-male commentators and white-male experts. And so, that is problematic, even though it was a step, because it still shows that much of the booking world and the television world and political discourse invites on minorities and women to give a, quote, unquote, diversity perspective. So because of the historic candidates we had in this primary, they were pulled in to give that commentary.
PESCA: Oh, so you think that those panels, those diverse panels, are going to go away now that we have just Barack Obama versus John McCain?
Mr. MELBER: Well, I hope they don't, and I hope that the political media continues to diversify and reflect the rest of the country, reflect even the people in Congress. I make the point in this article that "Meet the Press," which is the highest rated and really number one place to get political ideas going, was 85 percent male guests over a year period in a Media Matters study. Eighty-five percent, much higher than if you just randomly pulled members of Congress.
PESCA: Well, Congress is 16 percent women only.
Mr. MELBER: No, the House is higher than that.
PESCA: The House is 17 percent and 16 senators, so it's basically in line.
Mr. MELBER: Well, I don't know. I think the House is a little higher than that, and then senators, yeah. The point is they're lagging even a little bit behind that. And the Speaker of the House is a woman, so if you were going by leadership or important people. And you had a woman running, and you still are lagging behind, so my argument is that you should have people on, obviously, for all kinds of topics and not just in a diversity category.
PESCA: And the race statistics on the Sunday shows are pretty bad also, right?
Mr. MELBER: That's correct. I mean, basically, what you have, according to a similar Media Matter study, and an Urban League study found that basically 69 percent of all the appearances by African-American guests on all the Sunday shows were made by just three people, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powel and Juan Williams. Two of those being Republicans, one being, you know, Juan was also on NPR...
PESCA: One Juan Williams.
Mr. MELBER: And definitely not a liberal. And what you see is there's a great deal of ideological discrimination as well. Liberals are booked less even when Democrats control government, or part of government. And so, if you are, statistically speaking, an African-American woman, a liberal commentator, you're less likely to be booked because of your ideology, because of your race, because of your gender.
And that may explain why the Urban League found, quote, "that other than Rice, Powell and Williams, African-American guests accounted for less than three percent of all guest appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows." So to your point earlier about representation, that's three percent is far less than the African-Americans in the Congress.
PESCA: Do you think that if there is - I mean, a lot of that is a reflection of the big gets, or big members of the administration. And obviously, Powell and then Rice were the two highest - well, they weren't office holders, but the highest appointed black people in the history of this country. Do you think with the new administration, if there are more black people and more women, they're going to be interviewed more on the Sunday shows?
Mr. MELBER: No. No, the media is lagging behind, regardless. George W. Bush, one of the best things he's done on this topic is have the most diverse cabinet in American history. He deserves credit for that, however you think he got there. And nonetheless, these numbers are from during the Bush era. So to your point, no, the whole point of my piece is that for a host of reasons, the mainstream, most influential political media continue to lag behind the voters, both political parties, in representation.
So there's something more going on there. And with regard to the big gets, as you say, another one of the big gets is to get someone from the Washington Post. Well, as I point out, well, 17 of their 19 regular columnists are men. So if that's your starting point, you might begin on gender neutral grounds because a booker says, well, we just need someone from the Post. Oops, they're all guys, and most of them are white.
PESCA: Well, that's the ombudsman, or she's actually an ombudswoman these days, for the Washington Post, did point this out in her column, I think if you look at major institutions - the Congress, like we said, there's 16 female senators. The Fortune 500, if you look at the CEOs, there are 10 women, maybe 12 women by now, Fortune 500 CEOs, and I think four black men, all men, Fortune 500 CEOs.
So that's lagging. Congress is lagging. The media is lagging worse, you're saying, because as I survey the media landscape, it seems to me that things aren't - it's definitely not 50/50 in terms of gender, and definitely not 14 percent Latino, that's true, but it's a little better than the Fortune 500, and it's probably better than Congress, the way I see it.
Mr. MELBER: I don't think it's better than Congress, but we can leave that point. You're right. It's definitely better than the Fortune 500 at the CEO or management level. But no, my argument very strongly is that the political media - I'm talking here in this article about the political commentariat, the pundits, the op-ed writers, the people with the hard-edge opinion, which, if you've ever worked on a campaign, you know that those folks can make a much bigger difference than neutral coverage.
PESCA: Right. David Broder gets listened to, and George Will, and Charles Krauthammer. And those are all Washington Post, white, male columnists.
Mr. MELBER: Exactly.
PESCA: They're very influential. It's like a murderers' row of important people, but you're right. In the Washington Post, they're mostly white men. Here's what I want to ask you, because this is what we were talking about in the meeting. So Katie Couric got to anchor the CBS Evening News.
There's so much to talk about there, but what Matt Martinez said is, you know, let's say that, you know, the networks hear what you're saying, and you know, in ten years, it becomes 50 percent women and 14 percent Latino and 14 percent black, will the coverage really be that much better? Or will we just get different faces kind of saying the same stuff that we get on the TV news all the time?
Mr. MELBER: I don't know, and I don't care. I don't care whether the coverage changes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PESCA: Two-part answer.
Mr. MELBER: Yeah. This - the article I wrote, the argument I'm making, and the thing that people say they're tired of, but that the bookers and the powers that be need to address is the fact that the political commentariat lags behind the political community. It lags behind the United States.
PESCA: Why do you think that is?
Mr. MELBER: Number one, because people book the same old faces, and especially on television, you have this idea that, well, David Broder and David Gergen are the deans of political commentary. And with all due respect to their experience, they are at a very advanced stage in their career. They've been doing this for 40 years. If you go back to them, then that's a very closed circuit.
And if you are leaning on people who succeeded 40 years ago, then yeah, you're going to have an overwhelmingly white, male, you know, set of folks because you're going back to a different time in history. It's a sort of a casual grandfather clause. Number two, and this is something people don't like to talk about, there's ideological discrimination.
And that is why I point out also, in this Urban League study, there were only two black women besides Condi Rice who were ever on the Sunday shows over an 18-month period. It's not only because they're African-Americans, and they're women, but also because the majority of those commentators are liberal, and liberals get far less opportunities on the Sunday shows.
PESCA: Well, I mean, just off the top of my head, Michele Norris from NPR is on the Sunday show. Donna Brazile has been on this week. Amy Homes, who's a black woman, she's a Republican, she's on CNN. So there's three right there. Maybe I named all three?
Mr. MELBER: Look, Amy Homes is not on the Sunday shows.
PESCA: Oh, she's not on the Sunday - I see what you're saying, the Sunday shows.
Mr. MELBER: What I'm saying, again, people can go look up the study for themselves, Urban League, two black women. That's it, over an 18-month period.
PESCA: Wait, I just want to say - you mentioned David Gergen. Do we have it? I just want to know if we could play this tape. This is just funny interplay. So what happens if CNN gets a little more diverse? We found this delightful. This was Anderson Cooper talking to Donna Brazile.
(Soundbite of TV show "Anderson Cooper 360")
Ms. DONNA BRAZILE (Author, Educator, Democratic Party Strategist): He's told everyone that he plans to sit down with Senator Clinton at the right.
Mr. ANDERSON COOPER (Host, "Anderson Cooper 360"): I'm looking for something he hasn't told anyone else, just you.
Ms. BRAZILE: Anderson, you're not my boo.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. COOPER: I want to be your boo.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MARTIN: My gosh, they cracked up.
PESCA: See that guy laughing in the background? That was David Gergen.
MARTIN: David Gergen.
PESCA: I don't know what he - if he knew what to make of that. I don't know if this is the blunt future, but at least you get a little more diversity. You might - yeah, that's also speaking about age and loosening things up a little bit, which is - the Washington Post, the ombudsman said yes, there are 17 men, but one writer under 40. And you didn't really explicitly talk too much about that in your article, but is that a big thing, where we're just getting some of the same old people talking the same old points?
Mr. MELBER: I think so, and particularly on television, you have this idea of, well, if I haven't seen you before, you're not important. And so, it becomes a very closed network. And again, if it's people who made their names in the '70s, you know, Russert and Matthews, work for, you know, Tip O'Neil and politicians way back in the day at a time when things were even more skewed. So yeah, age bias is definitely a piece of it.
PESCA: All right. Ari Melber, net correspondent for the Nation. You can read his blog post on what he calls White Male Pundit Power on our website. Thanks very much, Ari.
Mr. MELBER: Thank you.
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