Friday, April 05, 2013

Sunday Political Shows and Diversity


Media Matters has done another study about the numbers of Republican, Democratic and neutral people on those shows.  Republicans are, in general, overrepresented.  Last time I looked at one of these studies someone argued that it was because they were the administration.  But this time they are not the administration.

This graph shows the percentage of men and women in the studied seven shows during the first quarter of 2013:





 The reason I don't terribly care for the term "diversity" is that we could argue that this graph does show diversity!  Women are included, after all. 

The problem, for me, is that just talking about "diversity" ignores the population percentages of various groups.  A spoonful of that and a pinch of this in the soup provides a diversity of flavors.  But women, for example, are more than half of the American population.  All other things being equal, we would expect their percentage of those shows to be slightly more than half, too.

I get that those other things are not equal.  But a nonstop focus on diversity puts less focus on that concept of fairness.