Monday, July 28, 2008

Where The Women Are: Not On Olbermann's Show



Media Matters of America looked at twelve prime-time political shows, four on each of the three cable networks, during the month of May to see what the race and gender distribution of the guests on those shows were.

Their results suggest that Latino guests are significantly underrepresented. The percentage of Latinos on those shows is less than three percent while fifteen percent of the overall population is Latino. On the other hand, African-Americans were represented roughly in proportion to their population percentage. I'm not sure why Media Matters appears to argue that they were not, though among that group men were slightly overrepresented and women underrepresented.

What about the women in general, then? Thirty-three percent of the guests were female. This is less than the population percentage of us gals, of course. Can you guess which program had the lowest percentage of female guests last May? Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He beat even Brit Hume on the manliness scale! He won (add chest thumping sounds)!

Only sixteen percent of his guests were women. Of course, if rants against Hillary Clinton counted he might have come across looking much better.

Just a small reminder that liberal doesn't necessarily equal feminist.