Study: Sunday talk shows lack black guests

WASHINGTON — Only 8 percent of the guests on the major Sunday-morning talk shows over the past 18 months were African Americans, with three people accounting for the majority of those appearances, according to a new study by the National Urban League.

Black guests — newsmakers, the journalists who questioned them and experts who offered commentary — appeared 176 times out of more than 2,100 opportunities, according to the study. But 122 of those appearances were made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state Colin Powell, and Juan Williams, a journalist and regular panel member on "Fox News Sunday."

"There's very clearly a division, an exclusion," said Stephanie Jones, executive director of the Urban League Institute, who initiated the study, "Sunday Morning Apartheid: A Diversity Study of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows."

"I watch these shows regularly," she said. "I just started to notice after a while, week after week after week, that there were no African Americans on them. I saw people talking about issues, even though they didn't have a particular expertise."

The study analyzed NBC's "Meet the Press," ABC's "This Week," CBS's "Face the Nation," Fox television's "Fox News Sunday" and CNN's "Late Edition." It found that more than 60 percent of the programs that aired during the 18-month period had no black guests. "Meet the Press," the talk show with the largest number of viewers, had no black guests on 86 percent of its broadcasts, the study said.

Network officials said they rely on guests who are newsmakers, most of whom are white men in the top echelons of government.

Studies also have shown poor minority representation in newspapers. A 2002 study by the Poynter Institute, "News and Race: Models of Excellence," cited research that news about minorities accounts for 5 to 7 percent of all content, even though African Americans and Latinos represent more than 30 percent of the U.S. population.

A Fox spokesman declined to comment on the Urban League study, and representatives of CNN and ABC did not return calls for comment.

Williams, a senior correspondent for National Public Radio and an analyst for "Fox News Sunday," is the only African American who appears regularly on a Sunday-morning talk show. "I don't go anywhere in the country without people saying, 'Thank God you're there,' " he said.

Sunday shows interview the most powerful people, Williams said, and African Americans often do not fit the bill. Race normally is not discussed unless there is a crisis, he said.

The Urban League study contends the Sunday-morning talk shows are particularly important because they help Americans digest complex political issues.

The Urban League study did not include appearances by members of other minority groups, but Lisa Navarette of the National Council of La Raza agreed that lack of diversity on the shows is a problem.

"People of color are not quoted as experts and they don't appear frequently," she said. "I've seen many discussions of the Latino vote and immigration done with people who are not terribly knowledgeable about the people or the subject."