Trouble in Nerdland: A Blow to Progress on Diversity + Inclusivity on TV News--and An Opportunity

Trouble in Nerdland: A Blow to Progress on Diversity + Inclusivity on TV News--and An Opportunityby RaeAnn Pickett | @RaeRoca | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The trouble in #Nerdland isn’t going away anytime soon because the many diverse voices MSNBC’s The Melissa Harris Perry Show allowed to be heard won’t shut up — not now, not ever.
Over the past two weeks, the show has repeatedly been pre-empted by election coverage, and host Melissa Harris-Perry, for one, is mad and won’t take it anymore, so she walked off the set. An email from Dr. Harris-Perry was posted on Medium Friday providing answers for an audience that has noticed the very-obvious absence.
Social media trending shows how disheartening fans and people with a stake in critical issues of the day find this development. The show has been a refreshing antidote to tone-deaf talking-head news shows featuring people who don’t look and sound at all like much of America. The implication of repeatedly seeing a row of exclusively white, male heads bobbing on the screen Sunday mornings is that they are the unabashed experts on those topics, and no other credible sources must exist because year after year after year, the same people representing the same narrow sliver of society has dominated those airwaves.
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show has been an integral part of the weekend lineup of issues-based national programming for the past four years: In large part, it is successful because fostered a safe and credible environment for people of color, women and other diverse experts to analyze issues that haven’t made their way into the mainstream, 24-hour news cycle — even though they represent the way we live 24/7.
Harris-Perry, was one of the first voices to discuss the unarmed shooting death of Michael Brown in a small town called Ferguson and called the killing what it was: murder of an unarmed, black teenager by a white police officer. She nimbly excavated the American foreclosure crisis, elevating the best minds to help affected audiences understand what happened, what to expect and what to demand from our leaders.
Called #Nerdland on Twitter, the community Harris-Perry created is celebrated because fans see themselves reflected in the diverse array of guest analysts and care about the issues being discussed for four hours every weekend. To say this shift in the demographic and topic areas for even a brief time on cable news is refreshing would be an understatement. Seeing a woman of color with a Ph.D. in political science go back and forth with other experts for deep, analytical segments about race, politics, culture and democracy was nearly unheard of before Harris-Perry’s show began.
In fact, Media Matters for America released an analysis of Sunday show demographics of guests, issues and hosts. Despite being a panel-style show, with multiple guests engaging on a variety of pressing, newsworthy issues and also airing on Sunday, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show wasn’t included in the original analysis as compared with the top five Sunday Shows. Nonetheless, of guests who appeared on those shows (“Face The Nation,” “Fox News Sunday,” “Meet The Press,” “This Week,” and “State of the Union”) were made up of 61 percent white males. At the time of the analysis, the host of CNN’s “State of The Union” was Candy Crowley. Today, the show is hosted by Jake Tapper.
Moreover, Media Matters also looked at Harris-Perry’s show and discovered it ”offered viewers by far the most ethnic and gender diversity among its guests, and was the only program to feature guests of color in greater proportion to both white guests and to their representation in the general population.”
As a communications professional for the last nine years in Washington, D.C., I see how hard it is to get diverse viewpoints across on broadcast television, especially when you are a woman, particularly a woman of color, or are talking about divisive issues like abortion. The truth is women are not heard from nearly enough in news coverage, according to the Global Media Monitoring Project.
In 2010, the project found women made up only 24 percent of the people heard, read about or seen in the news, a number that remain unchanged well into 2015. And a 2014 Women’s Media Center report foundthat “64 percent of bylines and on-camera appearances went to men at the nation’s top 20 TV networks, newspapers, online news sites and news.” As a proud citizen of # Nerdland, I am loath to go back to the days when I felt I didn’t have a place at the nerd table of controversial topics and intellectual nourishment.
Dr. Harris-Perry gave us all a seat at her table every weekend, but I am not asking her to return to a network that does not respect her point of view or mine. It is my hope that this hiccup does not deter her quest for inclusivity and diversity nor the necessity of networks to reckon with the fact that it’s their business to make this happen, too.
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RaeAnn Pickett, a Ms. Foundation Public Voices Fellow, is senior director of communications and public affairs at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.