Washington Journal = UnFAIR

We always thought of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” as a television purist’s dream: the sweet, humble, no-frills, plain-spoken and plain-looking, golly-shucks, Little Train That Could.

(Think “Situation Room”, then divide it by thirty, turn down the volume, switch your television to black and white and throw up antenna bunny ears … “Washington Journal” is for one-track minds only).

But Fair and Accuracy In Media — FAIR — thinks we’re all being bamboozled, kind of like how we all thought Hootie and the Blowfish was the next big thing, but then–thud!–they dropped “Fairweather Johnson.”

FAIR takes C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to task for “favoring Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins over Democratic and left-of-center guests. The study also found that women, people of color and public interest viewpoints were substantially underrepresented.” (See the full story for the data.)

Oh, the humanity! Where, oh where, have all our heroes gone? FAIR has crunched the data and the numbers don’t lie…Still, we can’t help thinking: Isn’t FAIR picking on C-SPAN like Tom Shales criticizing the Special Olympics for not making for interesting television?

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.