Over the past couple of days, Media Matters for America has been rolling out an analysis of who gets booked on cable news shows, and comparing it to data from a similar month in 2008. The findings are discouraging. In May 2008, 57 percent of all guests on evening cable news were white men. In April 2013, that number’s risen to 58 percent.

The network-by-network numbers are revealing. At CNN, 55 percent of guests in May 2008 were white men, but in April 2013, 62 percent of the network’s booked guests were white men. On Fox, the percentage of white male guests rose from 56 percent in May 2008 to 60 percent in April 2013, and that rise might have been sharper if Sean Hannity hadn’t booked 22 non-white guests in a single evening to discuss Dr. Ben Carson’s remarks comparing homosexuality and sexual disorders like bestiality and pedophilia and the ensuing controversy over whether he should speak at commencement for the Johns Hopkins school of medicine. MSNBC is the only network where the percentage of guests who were white men declined, from 61 percent in May 2008 to 54 percent in April 2013:

Even on the MSNBC evening news, that increase in diversity is largely driven by two shows, Politics Nation, anchored by Al Sharpton, where 51 percent of the April 2013 guests were non-white or women, and All In, Chris Hayes’ show, which continues his tradition of booking white men in numbers close to their actual representation in the United States, and had a guest roster that was 41 percent white and male. Chris Matthews’ show Hardball had a guest roster that was 66 percent white and male in April 2013—81 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 79 percent of them, across all races, were male. And 57 percent of Rachel Maddow’s guests in April 2013 were white men—89 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 63 percent of them, across races, were men.

Hayes has made clear that the key to his success in diversifying his guest roster is relatively simple: a desire to do so, and a willingness to ask for recommendations for guests. If All In does well as it settles in to its slot, MSNBC might consider whether a long-term way to distinguish itself from a flailing CNN and a Fox News retrenching in the wake of the November elections, is to offer up viewers not just hosts with different opinions, but very different participants in the people they’re in conversation with.

As I predicted back in February when the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that Conan O’Brien would be returning to host their annual dinner, O’Brien’s routine on Saturday was a fairly tame one that took harder aim at the media than at anyone in power. But in between his bit:

and President Barack Obama’s routine:

there were some decent gags. Here are ten of our favorites:
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In 1993, 42.4 million households tuned in to the series finale of Cheers. Last Friday, almost 42 million people tuned in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to watch the last hour of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old who today was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death in the bombings a week ago of the Boston Marathon. There’s no question that a national news event, particularly one centered on a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable crime, would draw an enormous audience. But the juxtaposition of those figures from twenty years apart serves to illustrate a useful point: national tragedies, particularly crime stories, are perhaps the last form of television that has a truly mass audience.

The extent to which the American television audience has fragmented is extraordinary, and not entirely a bad thing, driven as it has been by dramatic increases in the numer of offerings available to viewers, and a dramatic increase in their quality. In the 1952-1953 second season of I Love Lucy, for example, the show averaged a 67.3 rating, meaning 67.3 percent of American television households were tuned into the show during its time slot. It’s hard to come up with a directly comparable number for Friday night’s news coverage because ratings are done by show rather than in the aggregate, but if 42 million households tuned in to watch the manhunt, that would represent 36.8 percent of America’s 114.2 million television households. Similarly, n Cheers’ fifth season, its highest-rated, the show, which aired from 1986-1987, pulled in an average rating of 27.2, which averaged out to 23.77 million viewers per episode. Friends pulled in an average of 24.50 million viewers per episode in its eighth season, which aired in 2001-2002. But the last year a show that won the Nielsen ratings had a rating of above 20 was 1997-1998, when Seinfeld pulled in a 21.7 rating. In 2011-2012, NBC Sunday Night Football pulled in the crown with a mere 12.9 rating.

I’m not sad that we have so much tremendous television on the airwaves these days, and that people have so many options for terrific viewing that are specific to their interests. But I am sorry that there’s nothing narrative that unites us as much as television viewers as a manhunt like this did. The reasons we tune into events like the chase after Tsarnaev are clear. The crimes he is accused of committing are real, rather than fictional, which raises the stakes on our desire for resolution and closure. The events are unscripted—unlike crime shows, where familiar detectives have a particular knack of ending standoffs, real life encounters between criminals and the police are far more volatile. And this is programming with great potential for further violence that could be aired live. Particularly given the recent death of fugitive former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner in a standoff with police at a remote cabin, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother, in a fight with police earlier in the day, the chase for Tsarnaev seemed like it could easily have ended in a bombing or a shootout, rather than with the surrender that eventually took place.

It’s fear and morbid curiosity—neither of which are unjustified emotions—that draw us to this kind of chase. In the past it was possible to create enormous audiences through compelling characters and long-established relationships. Now, that seems impossible, and the reactions that bring us together are darker. That doesn’t mean our responses aren’t genuine or valid. But it’s a shame that we’re sharing collective terror and anxiety on a greater scale than we’re sharing joy, transport, and simple humor.

The rush to be the first outlet to break all sorts of news in the wake of the Monday bombing of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and left many others gravely injured has done all sorts of damage to both individuals’ reputations and to our larger community this week. The New York Post reported that a man of Saudi origin was being questioned by law enforcement in a Boston hospital in the wake of the bombing—it turned out he was merely a survivor of the attack who had been tackled by a bystander who was suspicious of him for doing the rather sensible thing of running away from a scene of carnage. The Boston Globe and CNN mistakenly reported that a suspect or suspects in the bombing had been arrested, when, as became clear, no such arrests had taken place. The Post subsequently published on its front page a photo of two men at the marathon with the headline “Bag Men,” suggesting they were wanted in the bombing—it emerged that they were Salah Eddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaime, local teenagers who had hoped to run part of the Marathon route in the wake of the officially-registered runners. And social media sites, included Reddit, suggested that missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi was a suspect in the bombing, a misidentification amplified significantly after his name was overheard on a police scanner during the escalated manhunt for the real suspects last night, and one that conservative media sites who seized on his name have been slow to correct.

These are serious errors, and they’ll bring a range of consequences, from lawsuits to loss of reputation, for the outlets that reported them or that doubled down on them, seemingly having abandoned standards of journalism like having two sources to confirm a piece of information. And reporters like Pete Williams of NBC News, who have been judicious and often first to be correct about developments in the investigation, will hopefully be rewarded for their care and reliability. I’m disgusted by the damage that the Post, in particular, has done to the reputations and potential safety of innocent people. And I think that a general rush to claim scoops and exclusives is counterproductive for journalism in general. It’s possible to develop true scoops through deep, proprietary reporting that genuinely reveals new information to the public that other outlets could not offer up because they haven’t done the same research and interviews. But much of the information claimed as proprietary is nothing of the sort: it’s reproductions of official announcements or information that will shortly become widely available. They’re scoops only in the sense that one reporter has a better wifi connection at a press conference than the competition, or that someone is able to type up a headline faster than other people who have received a press release at the same time. Claiming scoops or exclusives under those circumstances is a cheap way to try to burnish a publication’s credibility that actually does the opposite.
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After two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon yesterday, we got a clinic in the weaknesses of cable news as a format for covering breaking disaster news. In the absence of new, verifiable information to report minute-by-minute, networks ended up airing the same footage repeatedly, with varying degrees of context, bringing on paid commentators from former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Jane Harman to disgraced former Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman to fill airspace with commentary whose value or lack thereof will only be discernible in retrospect, and breaking to news conferences from Boston public officials and a statement from President Obama. It’s difficult to pull together context pieces in the midst of breaking news, but certainly not impossible. These are five segments or pieces of information cable networks might have considered pushing aggressively as a means of providing historical or regional context on the story that would have informed developments when they became available:

1. Details on Boston’s hospital system and first response system: Early reports of death and injury tolls were distorted by a report, still not explained, from the New York Post, that 12 people had died in the marathon bombing. Currently, the death toll from the attack stands at three people. In the absence of verifiable information about the death and injury numbers from the attack, one useful piece of context for national audiences would have been an explanation of the size and resources of Boston’s hospital system, which is exceptional for a city of its size, and means that the city had strong resources to deal with a tragedy of this magnitude. Explaining what the city’s hospital network looks like, and that the support network for the marathon included many medical professionals and first responders, could have provided context for the area’s medical resources and helped audiences manage their expectation of the death and grievous injury toll.

2. Information on housing and people-finder efforts: It’s important for news networks to remember who their audiences are—and as marathon runners were concentrated in Boston’s downtown hotels and meetup areas to get them away from the blast site, and particularly as cell service went down in the area, the audience for cable news included them and their families. In events like these, and even in the absence of a tragedy, cable news is on heavy rotation in hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, and other public spaces. Regularly and clearly explaining how runners and their families could check in on the people-locator set up by Google, how they could access offers of housing by people in the New England area, and how businesses and residents could unlock their wireless networks to make them accessible to runners who’d lost cell signals or who hadn’t yet retrieved their checked bags and who didn’t have access to their phones again, would have been a significant public service.

3. Historical coverage of domestic terrorist attacks like the Atlanta and Oklahoma City bombings: In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Americans have become accustomed to quick, and verifiable, claims of responsibility for terrorist attacks, which was not forthcoming in Boston. Rather than treating those attacks as the only possible context for the Boston Marathon bombing, it would be useful to air short features on attacks like the Centennial Park bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, as a reminder that there are many motivations for acts of mass murder, and that the investigation might be extended. The Oklahoma City bombing timeline would be a useful reminder that there were multiple theories about who had committed the attacks, including international terrorists following up on the first World Trade Center bombing, a drug cartel targeting the Drug Enforcement Agency, and conspiracy theory-minded Christian fundamentalists. All of these theories turned out to be false. And the Centennial Park bombing is an important caution both of the dangers of early accusations—Richard Jewell, a security guard who discovered the Atlanta bomb, was slandered as a suspect—and of the fact that these investigations will not immediately produce culprits. Eric Rudolph, who committed the Olympics bombing, continued to carry out attacks until 1998, and wasn’t caught until 2003.
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During his tenure on his weekend show at MSNBC, Up With Chris Hayes, Hayes and his staff managed to book a roster of guests that was striking more diverse than the comparable shows on any other network. Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ann Friedman asked Hayes how he’d achieved those numbers when so many other shows complain that it’s so difficult to break beyond the dominance of white men in political commentary. The answer? A strict quota system, and a reassessment of what kinds of perspectives were important to include in each debate:

But sometimes national politics is the hottest topic, and some argue that media can’t be held to a diversity standard when women and people of color are so drastically underrepresented in relevant spokesperson and leadership positions. Hayes acknowledges that, for shows like Meet the Press, there’s probably something to that excuse. But most news outlets aren’t only talking to senators and CEOs. There’s a wide range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on any number of political issues. And, without a quota, it’s easy to default to the same handful of big names.

“You have to say, ‘We give ourselves this rule,’ and that’s going to force us to just be more resourceful,” Hayes says. “Because I genuinely don’t think there’s another way to do it. If you don’t do that then the inertia and the tide are so strong, unless you are committed as a priority to actively fight against it, you’re going to end up reproducing what everyone else does.”

As he makes the transition to primetime, he plans to keep a quota system. “It’s going to be even harder to do at a daily level than it was at two shows a week,” he says. “But we’re a thousand percent committed to it.” After all, it’s part of what made his weekend show so successful. Hayes has heard from the audience that they appreciate the fresh faces and perspectives that this rule has forced him to cultivate.

I think this is a critical point. Newspaper and magazine columnists, people employed at various times by lobbying and consulting firms or political campaigns, and professional activists aren’t the only people who participate in—or are affected by—politics. A lawmaker may believe that, say, food stamps incentivize certain behavior, an academic who’s studied the question may have research to offer on the question, but someone who has actually had to live on food stamps for a period longer than the challenges lawmakers frequently take on has perspective to offer, too.

The idea of limiting the discussion to just one of those dimensions seems silly if it’s stated in those terms, or if you actually care about a real discussion. But there are people who have real interests in keeping political conversations circumscribed. Making those interests transparent rather than presenting them as an unfortunate result of the market is one of the reasons Hayes’ commitment to diversity is valuable. The whiteness of cable television is a choice, not a natural order.

As the New York Times reported today, Chris Hayes, the Nation editor-turned-MSNBC-weekend-host, will be moving from his Saturday and Sunday morning show to take over the 8 PM primetime slot on the network, replacing Ed Schultz, who will shift to the weekends. It’s a great development for people who like their news wonky rather than driven by a culture of gaffes and win-the-cycle mentality. And it’s also good news for another group of people: Hayes’ roster of guests, who will get exposed to a much bigger audience in primetime.

As Rob Savillo reports at Media Matters, Hayes’ show has booked strikingly more diverse guests than any of its competitors on Sunday morning. From January 6 of this year to March 10, the breakdown looks like this:

Up With Chris Hayes is close to booking white men in proportion to their actual presence in the U.S. population, 41 percent to 39 percent. All the other morning weekend shows on other networks are booking mixes of guests that are more than 60 percent white and male.

What’s important about this isn’t just that Hayes’ show could compete with other primetime news coverage by drawing in audiences eager for a different tone in news coverage, and eager to see experts who look like themselves on screen. It’s that the show demonstrates the lie that other shows aren’t diverse just because the pools of people available to pontificate on cable news are largely white and male. Even if they are, Hayes and his bookers have been able to find engaging guests with good insights who are capable of performing well on camera who aren’t primarily white guys. And if they can, the question is why everyone else seems to be having so much trouble? It’s one thing to go along with the accepted status quo in your industry without interrogating it. It’s another one entirely to be caught out as lazier than your competition, which has beaten you at something like representing a wider spectrum of opinions, experiences, and backgrounds, just by trying.

Cable news gets a bad rap for being truncated and sound-bitey, but the kind people at Al Jazeera was nice enough to ask me and a couple of other critics to come on and discuss the results of the Academy Awards—for 25 minutes:

For all the talk about the billion people who theoretically tune into the Academy Awards, there’s very little conversation about the overall international reaction to the results, unless a win sparks off a very particular reaction, as was the case with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film statuette for A Separation. I don’t agree with everything my fellow panelists said, but it was fascinating to hear how Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are playing outside the United States.

I wrote about this a bit yesterday in my review of House of Cards, but, while I respect the work of folks at MSNBC, I kind of think that the best way to take on cable news is not to go high-minded and triumphal a la The Newsroom, but savage and ridiculous. Fortunately, it sounds like Amazon, as part of their plans to expand into original programming* is planning to oblige me:

Amazon Studios has landed another big-name actor for one of its first six comedy pilots. I’ve learned that Jeffrey Tambor is set to star in The Onion Presents: The News. The project, from The Onion’s Will Graham & Dan Mirk (The Onion News Network, The Onion Sportsdome), is described as a fast-paced scripted comedy set behind the scenes of The Onion News Network that shows just how far journalists will go to stay at the top of their game. Tambor will play David Everett, ONN’s oldest and most respected news anchor. He is intellectual, highly ambitious, cutthroat and insecure as he believes his job is being threatened by the younger Cameron, whom David detests.

Tambor was actually quite good in Next Caller, a show NBC put into production about the employees of a satellite radio station that starred Dane Cook. The pilot itself was a little bit heavy on the wacky, and Cook’s appeal will always be limited to me. But Tambor, as the head of the station, embraced the ludicrousness of his position, which required him to program to niche audiences that ranged from the bros who tuned in to Cook’s show to people who really just wanted to listen to saucy Catholic nuns. And while it’s not as if the projects come from the same creators, or if Tambor is acting out his own ideas about media, his strong suit as an actor has always been characters who maintain a level of wounded dignity entirely inappropriate to their circumstances. That’s a nice set of skills to take to cable news as a subject, and goodness knows The Onion has a genius for finding examples of gaps and disjuncts between the reality of scenarios and the ways people comport themselves during them.

*Which includes an original series by Garry Trudeau about Congressmen sharing a rowhouse in Washington, for which I cannot wait.