Must be White Boy Day -- Sunday TV News Shows Exclude Blacks & Latinos

 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The influential Sunday news talk shows aired by U.S. television networks are overwhelmingly dominated by white men, with women, blacks and Latinos having little presence, a liberal media watchdog said on Monday.

About one in five guests on the programs were women, said the group, Media Matters for America, which studied four network Sunday news talk shows over a two-year period.

Blacks made up about 7 percent of those appearing on most of the programs, while Latinos made up about 1 percent, Media Matters said. In all, about seven out of every eight guests in 2005 and 2006 was white, the group said.

"Our report demonstrates the all-important Sunday shows are seriously lacking a meaningful presence of women and people of color," said David Brock, president of Media Matters.

The report came a month after radio host Don Imus lost his network television and radio shows for using a racial slur to describe the mostly black women's basketball team at Rutgers University.

The networks and prominent journalists who frequented Imus' show were criticized at the time because they had previously supported the program despite his track record of racist and sexist language.

Some critics said the Imus situation occurred in part because of a lack of diversity in the network newsrooms. [MORE] and [MORE]