I realize this will not be a terrible shock to anyone who pays attention to Sunday talking heads shows, but lean in for the secret anyway. Yes, it's true. With only a couple of exceptions, the Sunday shows are full of old conservative white men who outnumber progressive/liberal voices by a substantial margin. If one were to split the "neutral" classification down the middle on the graph at the top, it would still leave conservatives as the dominant voice on Sunday television.

MediaMatters studied all of the guests on the Sunday shows from the beginning of January through April 5th. They concluded that Sunday shows need a major facelift in terms of ethnic and diversity and much more balance in terms of the ideological points of view represented.

In the first three months of 2013, the broadcast networks' Sunday morning talk shows once again skewed strongly to the right and featured a startling lack of diversity among guests. For better or worse, these shows -- ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday -- occupy an elevated space in the national political discussion. This is where influential people -- like senators, representatives, presidential administration officials, Fortune 500 chief executives, and leaders of prominent non-profit organizations, for example -- get to set the terms of debate and frame the issues of the week. The shows enjoy considerably high ratings as well -- approximately 10 million weekly viewers collectively, according to recent numbers from TV Newser.

With that in mind, who the broadcast Sunday shows invite on as guests has significant implications for how discussions on major issues are framed. And once again, Republicans and conservatives have an edge over Democrats and progressives on these programs.While our report found that elected and administration officials hosted on these shows were much more likely to be Republican than Democratic, between the lines is an even more salient point: The findings run in stark contrast to previous trends and statements from the networks themselves.

The numbers on how women and minorities are represented on these shows are striking, and that runs across all of the networks with one exception: Up with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry both defied the norms on MSNBC. It would be good for other networks to pay heed and consider shaking up their bookers' contact list a bit.

The entire report is fascinating. You can read the full report here.

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Bill O'Reilly should really learn the difference between censorship and market forces, being a conservative and all. But since he confused the two in his Talking Points Memo Thursday night, I fear I need to correct him.

If the FCC were to yank Rush Limbaugh's show off the air, that would be censorship. Pressuring sponsors to drop their support for his hate speech is not censorship. It's the free market, weaving its magic.

There. That's better. While Rush Limbaugh continues to insist that no damage has been done by the ongoing left-side pressure on sponsors to drop his show, Billo carries the banner for him against Media Matters, who has begun to run ads in key markets pressuring radio stations. Again, Media Matters is not an arm of the state. It is a private, not-for-profit organization which exists to identify and call out right wing lies and hate speech.

While Bill fusses and fumes and calls for the IRS to revoke Media Matters' exempt status, they're quietly educating listeners about Limbaugh's reign of hate and terror without calling for Limbaugh to be taken off the air. They're simply calling for listeners and airing stations to stop tolerating broadcast hate speech.

Speaking of Rushbo, here's the latest news. It seems he has now hired a crisis management consultant to try and stop the bleeding before Mike Huckabee comes and steals his time slot (and affiliates).

Brian Glicklich has been acting on Limbaugh's behalf since at least March 8. Glicklich is a former vice president at Premiere Radio Networks, and currently heads the firm How Handy Is That, which specializes in reputation and crisis management and "gadfly defense." He previously worked as counsel to a firm that provides crisis management to clients like David Copperfield and Paris Hilton. Glicklich also has an extensive relationship with Glenn Beck, and is thanked in the acknowledgements of several of Beck's books.

How interesting, given that Billo acknowledges that Glenn Beck's demise came as a result of the very same techniques and some of the very same people's efforts. Rush Limbaugh had the nerve to claim in a statement that Media Matters was targeting "small businesses."

O'Reilly isn't above his own brand of hate speech, calling Media Matters' campaign "fascist" and "totalitarian" in this segment, while remaining utterly silent about the fact that Limbaugh called the President a "jackass" on today's show, which is carried on corporate airwaves while pounding home political ideologies.

Maybe Bill should listen to his own advice, where he says "unless a comment is violent or slanderous, it should be allowed." Oh, violence and slander on Fox News, let me count the ways. The many, many, many ways.

I'm certain Media Matters must be landing some punches in soft spots, because the more Limbaugh hurts, the more hyperbolic Billo becomes.

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Bill O'Reilly has been studying Orwell, I see. Up is down, right is wrong, Breitbart is God, Media Matters is Satan. Lawrence O'Donnell's claims that the media never uses the word "lie" notwithstanding, Billo seems to have no problem using it, at least when it applies to Media Matters. Unfortunately he should try looking in the mirror.

The conflict centers around this Media Matters post about gas prices from March 5th, which contrasts a Billo clip from the summer of 2008 with one from this year:

Following GOP strategy, Fox News is again blaming the Obama administration for rising gasoline prices -- a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by energy analysts. But back in the summer of 2008, when the average U.S. gasoline price hit a record high of $4.11, Fox said that "no President has the power to increase or to lower gas prices."

I shouldn't have to actually say this, but I will since it's the center of the Billo lie: Republican George W. Bush was President in the summer of 2008. Keep that thought while I lay out his very weird, Orwellian up-is-down argument, where he invokes the ghost of Breitbart as proof of evil intent. More from Media Matters:

In 2008, Fox's coverage occasionally even mirrored the facts: expanding domestic oil drilling will not significantly lower prices, and the only way to reduce our vulnerability to gas price spikes is to use less oil. Perhaps there was more room for reality-based coverage at Fox when there wasn't an incumbent president to defeat?

Here is O'Reilly's insane argument:

O'REILLY: Before he died, Andrew Breitbart spoke to The Hollywood Reporter. That was the last interview he ever did. Mr. Breitbart was upset because he believed the left-wing media was trying to destroy him. He pointed to Media Matters as the primary offender.

Breitbart went on to accuse the far-left website of receiving orders from the DNC and passing those orders on to MSNBC. Breitbart called it a rigged operation and was furious that a news agency as powerful as NBC would engage in dishonest practices.

O'Reilly starts babbling about George Soros and corruption of the editorial process right after that.

So, Billo, That's some classic right-wing projection there. Accuse your enemy of what you are doing. I've written this so often it's probably etched on this site in stone, but let me adjust the tense: Breitbart lied. He lied, and he spoke lies easily because lies were his native tongue. So please excuse me if I scoff at Breitbart's paranoia for a moment.

There. Much better. If only his lying sites could have been destroyed with the truth, but alas. As long as there is an appetite for lies, those sites will soldier on, with or without Andrew Breitbart, and definitely in partnership with Fox News.

Billo now steps up with his claim that he, the Great and Powerful O'Reilly, has been Media Matters' victim, too!

O'REILLY: As you know, I've been very critical of the oil companies jacking up gas prices when there is plenty of supply available in the USA. I've criticized President Obama for doing nothing about it when he could call the oil chieftains and get behind legislation to limit oil speculation.

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Much of Sean Hannity's Friday show was devoted to complaining that the left-wing is loaded with haters who do things right-wingers would never, ever do, like organize boycotts to do harm to those who say right-wing things. He was, of course, continuing the ongoing smear campaign against Media Matters, who must just be driving them all crazy over at Fox News now that there's a book out exposing their strategies.

But really, Sean Hannity should try the Google before he lays down challenges like this one. While I'm unimpressed with "Democratic strategist" Julie Roginsky's response, it's his challenge I really want to look at more carefully. After asking why it is the left "always goes after conservatives" without going after their own, Roginsky tosses off a rather careless response, saying, "that's the left. The right does the same thing."

And that begins the Sean Hannity pissing contest challenge.

HANNITY: Have they [Newsbusters] ever gone after people and started boycott campaigns?

ROGINSKY: I have no idea what Newsbusters does --

HANNITY: But Media Matters has, haven't they?

Some back and forth about first amendment rights, etc, and then the Hannity Challenge:

HANNITY: But here's the difference. I don't know any conservative, and you can't name one, that's hiring private investigators, that's organizing with the White House and collaborating with them, and attempting to get advertisers to pull out of shows in an attempt to silence voices. Can you name a conservative equivalent?

ROGINSKY: I don't follow conservative media, so I don't, but I can say this --

HANNITY: I can tell you, I can't name one, and I know conservative media.

Let's leave aside Hannity's lies about collaboration with the White House, which is just nonsense. He cannot seem to name one conservative organization that organizes boycotts? Really?

Let me take that challenge, because Sean Hannity doesn't seem to know conservative media or conservative infrastructure as well as he thinks he does.

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That video is James O'Keefe describing his journalist "sting" project. In this specific case, he describes his "sting" investigating journalists for misinformation, bias and coverups, especially with respect to Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein.

It makes one wonder whether Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was a target of O'Keefe's grand plan.

Via Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post, a story of a bogus Verizon representative asking some very weird questions. Evidently this "Verizon employee" stopped by Boehlert's house to take a customer satisfaction survey. Verizon confirms they do not send people door to door for customer satisfaction surveys, however. After asking some fairly routine questions, it started to get weird.

"So he gets to the last questions, and he's really reading intently off of his clipboard, and he says something about making the kind of salary I do, working from home, something something about the 99 percenters," Boehlert said.

The man claiming to be a Verizon representative finally asked his question. "After he mentioned my salary and that I work from home, all the bells went off, and this is not who this guy says he is. Therefore, I kind of lost track of the exact wording of the question, but it definitely was like very accusatory of me and I'm a hypocrite and how do I have this supposedly cushy job while I'm writing about real workers and the people of the 99 percent," said Boehlert.

"So there was this pause, and I said, 'You work for Verizon?' And he just sort of looks back at me and [says], 'Will you answer the question? Will you answer the question?' And I said, 'Can I see your Verizon ID?' And he wouldn't produce any Verizon ID, and I think he asked me another time to answer the question. And basically I just said, 'I'm done so you can leave now.'"

My interaction with Eric Boehlert has been limited to Twitter, but my take on him is that he is not easily fooled, intimidated, or otherwise pushed around. And he wasn't here, either.

Boehlert decided to follow him to obtain his license plate number. By now he had realized that the man was likely pulling a political stunt, and James O'Keefe's notorious "To Catch a Journalist" project came to mind as a possibility.

"The only sort of comical part was he forget which way he was supposed to run in case I started following. He ended up sort of in the road, and he sort of turned left and then right," said Boehlert. "The last I saw him he was in a full sprint down my street running away from my house."

The police and Verizon were called. The only thing missing from this story is James O'Keefe's emphatic denial. There doesn't appear to be anything like that on the record, though Andrew Breitbart has categorically denied any involvement in this particular stunt.

In response to an instant message asking if he was responsible for the fake Verizon representative, Breitbart said no.

So what gives, James O'Keefe? Don't you think that as the director of an organization subsidized with taxpayer funds, you should step up and tell us whether you targeted Boehlert or not? A simple yes or no will do.

I'll bet you're wondering how many lies Bill Bennett and Sean Hannity can shove into one minute and 41 seconds. I'm about to show you. This little clip is so priceless for so many reasons. Beyond Bill Bennett's reverent repetition of the usual lies and half-truths in the name of Saint Ronnie, it's just a shining example of why Fox News viewers are ignorant and biased. The conversation takes place with reverent clips flowing on the screen in homage to the Great Sainted Ronald Reagan, while Bennett's eyes get just a little misty as he stares past the camera in reverent reverie.

First, we have the tax lie.

HANNITY: You know what's interesting to me, though? Things are so -- I know things change, but they really remain the same. It's the battle between the state and their utopia, if you will. To quote my buddy Levin, statism versus liberty.

BENNETT: Yeah. Ronald Reagan, the way I tell it, and I served with him as you know. I was his Secretary of Education and I had another job too. He wanted to do two things. He wanted to restore America and destroy the Soviet Union. You know, he was just straightforward about it.

Here -- you talk about things being the same. Carter. You remember what the country was like under Jimmy Carter? That's kind of like where we are -- maybe worse. It may be worse. But the country was feeling bad, worried about the future. We know what the misery index was. Ronald Reagan came in, sunny, optimistic, and with a plan. He said we're going to restore America.

You know, a lot of people forget. We talk about lowering taxes. It was not part of Republican doctrine until Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, my former partner --

HANNITY: Kemp-Roth tax bill

BENNETT: -- made it part of Republican doctrine. And now it is.

Just for the record, Ronald Reagan raised taxes eleven times. That's an interesting way to create doctrine, don't you think? Insert some sort of doctrinal pledge never to raise taxes while raising them? But again, this is Saint Ronnie we're talking about and so he didn't raise taxes, even if he did. Eleven times.

Onward to the "lazy, angry, bitter, clinging to Gods and guns" meme:

BENNETT: And so he told America to get up, lift up, he didn't say we were lazy people --

HANNITY: He didn't say we're lazy or slothful?

BENNETT: No, he didn't...

HANNITY: Wait, he didn't say we were angry, bitter, clinging to guns and bibles and religion?

BENNETT: He actually didn't think we were the problem, you know, he actually thought the problem was elsewhere and then looking abroad, he always held up the banner of freedom, and always held up the banner of America, whether it was Nicaragua, whether it was China, whether it was the Soviet Union and boy was the Soviet Union...

How many stories are there from the Reagan era about how about Shiransky hearing the tap, you know Reagan is President, things are going to change, we knew change was going to come.

Wow.

Under Reagan, the U.S. waged a proxy war in Nicaragua against a lawfully elected President of that country -- Daniel Ortega -- with CIA resources. In fact, CIA director Stansfield Turner characterized our policy in Nicaragua as "state-sponsored terrorism". It isn't an especially proud moment in our history, and with the whole Iran-Contra scandal it's especially odious and ugly. But listen to the amazing rewrite Bill Bennett gives it. He makes it sound like every political prisoner everywhere perked right up when Reagan took office and knew -- KNEW -- that they would be released.

Really?

And of course, Hannity and Bennett have no problem repeating the lie that our current President thinks we're lazy, which is of course not at all what he said.

So how many lies is that? Well, it's as many as they could fit into a very short time, while waving the Saint Ronnie flag in its fully furled glory. And their audience probably wept at the memory of that sainted man who led our country into the financial ruin it is today.

This morning on Fox News, radio bloviator Tony Katz said this:

There's no such thing as income inequality. A stockbroker makes more than a schoolteacher and a schoolteacher exists off the excesses of the stockbroker and the capitalist and people who pay into the system to allow the educator to exist.

I am trying to imagine a world where stockbrokers and capitalists exist without teachers. I can't. A capitalist system exists because ideas become some kind of product or service and those products and/or services are capitalized in order to make a wider market. At the heart of any enterprise, there is education, whether it be an education of the idea-maker or those who actually execute the idea.

But for Tony Katz, education exists only because the capitalist and others have "excess," which he implies is taken from them to fund a system which teachers and professors then benefit from without any work. What kind of logic is that? One immediate retort that formed in my mind while listening to this clip was that Katz would not be sitting there spewing that nonsense if he actually had a decent education. And if he did have a decent education, then he, too, is the beneficiary of hard-working professors and teachers who were not leeches on the capitalist system, but the builders of it through the education process.

Here's something else for Tony Katz to chew over. California used to have the finest public university system in the country. Our state universities did not charge tuition. Because they didn't, admission was open to anyone who qualified. Then Ronald Reagan was elected. One of the first things he did was change the system to a tuition-based system. My mother went to UCLA in the late 1950s. She could not have attended that university if tuition were required. She went on to work and work hard throughout her career in times where women were not especially welcome in the workplace, much less the management end of the workplace. Yes, Mr. Katz. She was college-educated and she worked a whole lot harder than you are when you just spew nonsense out over the airwaves.

College tuition for those students protesting at UC Davis was $13,000+ this year for California residents. By comparison, in 1995 it was $4,100. When I was attending college in the Cal State system, tuition was $144.00 and the state paid it because I was in the top 10 percent of my class. In 2007 when my son entered the Cal State system, tuition was $2,772. In 2010-2011, it's $4,335. As the parent of a Cal State student and a soon-to-be (we hope) UC student, I can guarantee you those kids are getting nothing handed to them. Nothing, except perhaps a very large bill for accrued tuition.

Yes, they have every reason to protest such things as income inequality and unfair exploitation of their current and future opportunities.

In his must-read New York Magazine essay entitled "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?", David Frum takes on Fox News with a vengeance. Here's a small taste of the bitters he served them:

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To quote Lawrence O'Donnell from his show back in February, Wayne LaPierre is "Washington's lobbyist in favor of murderers' rights, always to use the gun of their choice." There is no better summary of a man who ensures his $1.27 million salary every year by being a paid serial liar in defense of arms dealers, which groups such as the Violence Policy Center have made clear again and again.

So it should be no surprise that when faced with the rights of Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or those of Mexican Drug Cartels, he comes down squarely on the side of the latter, as pointed out by Media Matters:

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), has been on a media blitz trying to defend an NRA lawsuit that attempts to block an executive rule aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of cartels and criminals. The new rule would require gun stores along the border with Mexico to report to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) when a person purchases multiple long guns, such as the cartel favorite AK-47.

ATF agent and Fast and Furious whistleblower Peter Forcelli, whom the NRA has previously cited as an expert on tactics, disagrees with LaPierre. Forcelli told Political Correction that the "vast majority of ATF agents support the reporting requirement, because they know how it works."

Of course it works. It is common sense that it would work, except manufacturing doubt--from the oil companies to the tobacco pushers to the gun runners--is what these guys do. Common sense and science are their enemies. They might save a few lives, but then LaPierre might only make $1.1 million per annum.

Follow me on Twitter: @cliffschecter

By now, you've probably already heard of Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who came out as undocumented in the New York Times Magazine. Memeorandum and Mediagazer, sites which aggregate political and media news, are exploding with his story. Matthew Yglesias even dropped his academic pretensions for a bit to shed a tear or two for Vargas. I say that with love.

If you're as moved as Mathew Yglesias has been moved, and there's only one thing you do in reaction to Vargas' story call Barack Obama through Presente.org and ask him to stop deporting people like Vargas.

Media Matters has a good round-up of the nativist conservatives that are committing demographic suicide by going berserk over this story. I'll write more on the nativists, later, but Vargas' story has highlighted, yet again, for me, how far progressives and the mainstream media have to go before they can begin to cover these stories accurately and with a semblance of humanity. Let's start with Heather Horn staff writer at The Atlantic:

Whatever you think of the illegal immigration issue, it's hard to dispute that there's a fundamental injustice occurring if Vargas gets let off the hook, while hundreds of thousands of other illegals get deported. Even those who want to see productive illegal immigrants granted amnesty might admit that making exceptions purely based on prominence isn't right. What if there's someone as intelligent and productive as Vargas--but not as famous--out there right now?

Heather Horn - The Atlantic (22 June 2011)

Wow. I don't even know where to start. While I somehow doubt Horn's concern for the "hundreds of thousands" that are being deported I've already told people who are concerned to call Barack Obama and ask that his administration use discretion to stop deporting people like Vargas. Recognizing that, I'll start simple with Horn's use of the term "illegal". More people have referred to Vargas as an "illegal immigrant" at this point than I care to count. Not only is that phrase dehumanizing, it's legally innaccurate. No human being is illegal. The word illegal should be used to describe acts, not to define people. Horn, however, goes a step further than dehumanization and legal innaccuracy and gets into butchering grammar with her use of the word "illegals." Sorry Ms. Horn, the word "illegal" is not a noun. Maybe you and the nativists who dehumanize people with the term "illegals" should start taking English lessons from undocumented people like Vargas. If you haven't signed the pledge to Drop The I-Word, please do so.

To Horn's central point about fairness, I'll bring in Nick Baumann at Mother Jones:

I'm sympathetic to Matt Yglesias' view that we should empathize with all people who come to the United States in search of a better life, even if, unlike Vargas, they do so knowing that what they're doing is illegal. But I've also worked with foreign-born journalists who've paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and waded through miles of red tape and seemingly senseless regulations—including, sometimes, returning to their home countries for a period—in order to work in this country.* (This applies outside of journalism, too, of course.) I wonder how they're feeling about Jose Antonio Vargas this morning.

Nick Baumann - Mother Jones (22 June 2011)

It's difficult for me not to descend into sarcasm after reading this. Does Baumann really think that foreign journalists envy Vargas' position, right now, or for the last decade and a half, for that matter? Would Baumann care to get any of those foreign journalists on record so we know who those heartless bastards are? I thought the supposedly liberal Mother Jones magazine really took a step forward when reporter Tim Murphy stopped using the word "illegal," but Baumann just put the magazine another huge step backward in the anti-migrant direction with this post. Finally, I'll refer to Bryan Preston over at Pajamas Media whom I believe most succinctly provides the nativist view:

He took at least two jobs that otherwise would have gone to others who are here legally.

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*Conservatives from The Weekly Standard and The Daily Caller admit to host of The Big Picture, Thom Hartmann, that closing the gun show loophole would be a good idea.

Somehow, between breathless fanboy posts alerting his readers to the every movement of Rick Perry (he sure is dreamy!), The National Review's Kevin Williamson found time to prostrate himself (not once, but twice) before National Rifle Association (NRA) talking points, support the interests of al-Qaeda, and fit multiple lies all into one little screed.

Pretty impressive work, especially when you factor in his limited availability. I mean, those Rick Perry posters aren't going to just stare at themselves.

In these pieces, al-Qaeda Tool Williamson did what gun fetishists and NRA apologists always do when inconvenient truths about the blood already on their hands, or yet to come, are presented to them: He threw out random vituperation (even attacking one of his colleagues at NRO who happens to have more common sense than he could ever possess--he must be an absolute joy to work with!), and some misdirection that would make Houdini proud.

My problem, of course, is that I don't much like wannabe-bullies. Especially those who view the NRA like David Vitter does a lady-of-the-night with extra Huggies in hand, even more so when they lie and attack my friends at Media Matters on an issue I work on and care about, with Bachmannian reasoning to boot. So I thought I might respond, you know, for fun.

The crux of our story is that Adam Gadahn, the American-born al-Qaeda spokesman, made a statement that was 90% correct about the easy availability of firearms for terrorists in the US (because of people like Williamson and the NRA), so this al-Qaeda Tool, of course, chose to focus on the 10% that wasn't accurate. Here is our own David Neiwert's explanation of what set off this jack-in-the-box originally:

That popping sound you hear is the heads of NRA loyalists exploding from massive cognitive dissonance, all because of the release this week of a video showing a spokesman for al-Qaeda, Adam Gadahn, urging would-be jihadis to go out and stock up on as many guns as they can get their hands on -- through the gun-show loophole

So what do you do when you're a shill for the NRA and have to explain why you don't support the simple common sense of 69% of NRA members and 85% of Americans, (in a poll conducted by known liberal Frank Luntz for Mayors Against Illegal Guns) all of whom want to close the Gun Show Loophole? The one that Al Qaeda thug Gadahn spoke about. The one that has allowed everyone from Hezbollah to Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell to the Columbine killers to arm themselves--and provided a nice source of income for Timothy McVeigh. The one that sadly, as the thug Gadahn points out, would allow any Ayman al-Zwahiri to walk into a gun show in the 33 states that have not closed it, and buy a gun from "private sellers" without any kind of background check.

What you do is lie of course, and portray private sales of firearms as "Uncle Bubba," deciding "to swap his deer rifle to Otis for $100 and a case of Bud."

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