http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/right-and-early/
Right and Early
Sunday morning shows are GOP TV
By Peter Hart
"If the Sunday morning TV chat shows seem like a sea of Republican politicians and conservative spinners lately, it’s not your imagination.
While you might expect to see a lot of Republican candidates and their surrogates in the thick of a Republican primary contest, the four Sunday morning talk shows—ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday—have been extraordinarily friendly terrain for the right, as a new FAIR study documents.
Evaluating the guest lists for the eight months from June 2011 through February 2012, FAIR found a distinct conservative skew in both one-on-one interview segments and roundtable discussions.
Bob Schieffer--Photo Credit: Michael Foley
Bob Schieffer--Photo Credit: Michael Foley
On November 6, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer introduced his show as featuring a “cross-section of Republicans”—turning the discussion over to surrogates for Republican presidential candidates and various party operatives.
That kind of lineup was hardly unusual. The same day, in fact, ABC This Week’s panel featured three conservatives—George Will, Niall Ferguson and Matthew Dowd—and left-liberal Arianna Huffington. Mean-while, on NBC that Sunday, viewers were treated to a different kind of imbalance: A panel featuring two right-wing guests—Republican political operative Alex Castellanos and Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel—paired with two centrist journalists.
These imbalances were indicative of the larger patterns seen over the course of the study period. As one might expect, U.S. government sources—current officials, former lawmakers, political candidates, party-affiliated political operatives and campaign advisers—dominated the Sunday shows overall, accounting for 47 percent of appearances (445 out of 943). Following closely behind were journalists, who, with 406 appearances, were 43 percent of sources. Most were middle-of-the-road Beltway political reporters..."
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