'Martin Luther King Jr. often referred to 11am on Sunday as “the most segregated hour in America” – his way of highlighting hypocrisy and racial exclusion in Christian churches.
Today on television, that hour remains a time of exclusion and discrimination. It’s the time that the high priests of Washington’s Beltway gather on TV to pontificate about politics.
Just as churches preached about brotherly love as they excluded African-Americans, TV’s beltway pundit shows preach about elections while typically excluding nearly half of the political spectrum – the progressive half.
With the winds of change threatening to blow open the 2006 election, I’ve been turning more and more to the Sunday morning politics shows. But I find the same old players, a narrow mix of tired pundits – and virtually no one sympathetic to the new winds raging.
These programs tend to feature solid rightwing pundits vs. waffling liberals – a spectrum no broader than from GE to GM. Viewers regularly see proud conservative advocates like George Will, Brit Hume, William Kristol and Robert Novak; we rarely see proud progressive advocates.
And it’s not just Sunday mornings. Evenings on cable news are also dominated by rightwing hosts – Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, etc. -- with only Keith Olbermann offering any backtalk. And “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” has just hired as its Democratic pundit, Mike (telecom industry lobbyist against net neutrality) McCurry.'
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1024-30.htm
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