FAIR and the PBS NewsHour: Assessing Diversity and Elitism in News Sourcing

Public Television for Liberals? The Demographic and Behavioral Characteristics of The PBS Newshour Viewers

“…The author also shows that more than 75% of PBS's on-camera sources were elites (e.g., corporate representatives, government officials, or professionals), and that the general public or citizen activists received little attention. Scott et al (2010) also problematize PBS's sourcing practices and suggest that PBS could have relied on more diverse sources (e.g., foreign-based sources, individuals of color, or public interest advocates), using Democracy Now!, an alternative news media, as a comparison. These studies are not without methodological issues, but they improve our understanding of how PBS covers politics.…”

Diversity of News Consumption in a Digital Information Environment

“…The more even the dispersion of the representation among source affiliations, status, and proximity in a given story or medium, the greater the diversity" (p. 583) Content "dispersion of representation of ideas, perspectives, attributions, opinions, or frames within a news product, and within the context of one particular issue." (p. 585) Napoli (1999) 8, 21, 26, 37, 82, 83, 88, 89, 95, 98, 103, 108, 125, 136, 137, 166, 168, 174, 176, 188 Source Content Ownership "producers of the programs that run on the individual cable channels" (p.12) Outlet Ownership "owners of the individual channels that are carried on the cable systems" (p. 75,82,83,87,93,94,95,100,116,150,166,175,188,191,198,203 Content Political "differing and conflicting interests which seek public expression" (p. 150) Geographical "serve local needs, as well as to help integration into thee wider society" (p. One additional form of defining diversity can be found in the studies that usually do not cite any other scholars for their definition or that only cite methodological studies (mostly those shown in Figure 5 that are not connected to the rest of the network). They use a more procedural approach -defining a concept by the procedure of the measurement.…”