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 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.

In Hollywood, executives are notoriously reluctant to admit that they’re on the lookout for viewers of color. For some reason, it seems to be conventional wisdom that, say, the kind of content that African-American audiences are looking for overlaps in no way with anything any white viewer might be engaged by, ever. And so expressing a wish for a black, Latino, or Asian audience is apparently to express a wish to make a niche product.

So there’s something really refreshing about seeing MSNBC president Phil Griffin tout the fact that his network, which was already number one in cable news for African-American viewers, grew their African-American viewership in 2012 by 60 percent, in a year when CNN’s grew 23.7 percent and Fox’s declined by the same number.

“I think we made a commitment, we decided, that in order for this channel to succeed, that we had to reflect the country. This meant that we had to be part of the country in ways that the other channels weren’t,” he told Mediaite. “People want to know that we reflect their world. And it’s not just a single show – its across the board. You look at the guests every hour and we make sure that we have women, African Americans, everything, and I think to spend a day watching MSNBC is to see America as we have seen it.”

It’s not just a relief to hear Griffin say this—it’s smart strategy. I don’t know why it’s surprising to anyone that as a nerdy lady, I enjoy seeing a reflection of that identity in Rachel Maddow when she’s on the air, rather than needing the news delivered to me by an authoritative white dude my father’s age. And I’m not sure why it’s surprising either that people might like to see an African-American woman like Melissa Harris-Perry lead discussions of, among other issues, race, because we’re interested in the particular perspectives she brings to the table that we don’t happen to possess on our own. Enjoying seeing myself on screen, and enjoying the insights and experiences of people who are not like me, and whose perspectives I can’t magically situate myself into are not actually mutually exclusive impulses.
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NBCUniversal has a relationship with Donald Trump, the long-time performance artist and host of its NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, that’s strikingly similar to the one between the Donald and the Romney campaign McKay Coppins described in one of what will be one of many post-mortems of the campaign:

Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard — an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obama’s birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. But he was also popular among the very voters Romney was most concerned about winning over. And the candidate’s aides believed — perhaps naively — that if they could win his endorsement, they might be able to win the hearts of his many conservative fans. “He played very well with blue-collar-type Republicans, and the campaign saw that,” said one source in Trump’s camp. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.”

For NBC, The Apprentice is a product similar to a Trump political endorsement. It’s relatively cheap to buy, in part because it’s heavily supported by product placement. It channels the things that make Trump irritating, his presumptions of expertise, his abrasiveness, and his showman’s flair, towards reasonably amusing targets. And in its Celebrity Apprentice iteration, the show pulls in stars with their own followings. For this, Trump got a $130 million contract from NBC last year. But NBC handed down that deal to Trump at the end of an awful year for the network. And now that the ratings landscape–and the political one–are very different, NBC should seriously consider if they want to stay in business with Trump, or if both he and The Apprentice have reached the end of their usefulness.

The Apprentice is probably near the end of its natural lifespan as a show anyway. Its celebrity editions are drawing fewer than 9 million viewers per episode, a figure that isn’t bad, but also isn’t strong enough to use to launch other new shows. And it pales in comparison to The Voice, which both has given NBC a platform to boost freshman success stories like Revolution and Go On, and provides an alternate revenue stream to the network in the form of music sales. As NBC solidifies its revitalized brand, and as non-musical competition shows increasingly show their age, the network should consider Trump and The Apprentice both in the context of the larger primetime environment and with an eye towards the special headaches Trump brings in his wake.
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