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

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, the media advocacy group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has issued a series of studies criticizing the PBS NewsHour for having an “establishment bias” and a lack of diversity in news sourcing. However, the perception of FAIR as a liberal advocacy group, and various methodological ambiguities, establish the need for an independent cross-verification of their research findings. A partial replication and a comparative analysis with the alternative independent newscast, Democracy Now!, confirm and validate many of FAIR's claims regarding the narrow sourcing practices of the PBS NewsHour.

Keywords:

• Alternative Media
• Democracy Now!
• News Sourcing
• PBS NewsHour

We thank Donna Graham, Brande Flack, and Robert H. Gobetz for their assistance with the manuscript. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Mass Communication Division of the 2009 Central States Communication Association Convention, St. Louis, MO.

Notes

Note. Think tanks and general public sources were not assessed in the 1990 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) study. All percentages were rounded to the nearest whole number.

The original 1990 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting report did not include many of these key methodological details. Additional methodological information was later provided by coauthor William Hoynes in his 1994 book, Public Television for Sale: Media, the Market, and the Public Sphere. The original study also included an analysis of the guest list for the ABC newscast Nightline.

A variation of this article was later published by Croteau and Hoynes in their 1994 book, By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate (see pp. 139–169), and expanded on in a lengthier 1996 article in Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs. Based on these additional sources, it was revealed that Croteau, Hoynes, and Carragee served as the coders for the study and also confirmed the reliance on printed transcripts.

Capitalization of “THEM” appeared in the original publication.

A study authored by Reese, Grant, and Danielian (1994) examined sourcing patterns for CBS News, Nightline, PBS NewsHour, and This Week With David Brinkley, which used printed transcripts from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives Abstracts and TV summaries in The New York Times. Cumulatively, common sourcing patterns existed across news programs that reflected a substantial reliance on current and former government officials and other “insider” sources.

According to the Democracy Now! Web site, the program currently lists six producers.

Riffe, Lacy, and Fico (1998), in their review of the literature, identified recommended intercoder sample sizes as small as 5% to 7% and as large as 10% to 20% of the total dataset (p. 123).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David K. Scott

David K. Scott (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, 1994) is a professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies at Northeastern State University.

Mike Chanslor

Mike Chanslor (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma, 1995) is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies at Northeastern State University.

Jennifer Dixon

Jennifer Dixon (M.A., Kansas State University, 2007) is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri.