A new report by media watchdog group Media Matters concludes there is an inordinate percentage of white males among the guests who appear on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
Media Matters — an organization founded in 2004 with money from Democratic Party donors — catalogued the gender and ethnicity of 1,677 guests who appeared on cable news networks during evening hours in April 2013.
“According to the most recent U.S. Census data, white men make up only 31 percent of the U.S. population,” Media Matters reported. “On evening cable news, they represented a much larger percentage of guests — 62 percent of guests on CNN, 60 percent on Fox, and 54 percent on MSNBC.”
The Media Matters data points included:
Percentage of guests who were men
- CNN: 76 percent
- Fox News: 71 percent
- MSNBC: 67 percent
- Percentage of guests who were white CNN: 81 percent
- Fox News: 83 percent
- MSNBC: 73 percent
Jamshid Ghazi Askar is a graduate of BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School and member of the Utah State Bar. Contact him at jaskar@desnews.com or 801-236-6051.