In his 2005 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Kenneth Tomlinson, former director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said, ??in terms of the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, there is no balance problem. That is great journalism.? Hudson Institute fellow Ken Bode said, ?On PBS, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer is the mothership of balance.?

A recent study by the media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reached a different conclusion. For more than 20 years, FAIR has worked to provide a consistent analysis of news content and the business of news media. In the recent study, ?Are you on the NewsHour?s Guestlist? PBS flagship news show fails public mission,? FAIR looked at a six-month period of programming, from October 2005 to March 2006, and analyzed the people interviewed on NewsHour. Some general findings of the study: current and former government officials made up 50% of the guests, with the next highest group, the general public, coming in at 14%, and journalists accounting for 10% of the total guests. Public interest advocates were only 4% of the guests. White males dominated the debate on NewsHour, accounting for 76% of all guests.

The FAIR study shows that the NewsHour has a slightly greater diversity of voices when compared to commercial news, but it earns no plaudits for embracing the underrepresented. In terms of excluding voices, the disparities are clear: women represented just 18% of the total guests, African-Americans 9%, Latinos 2%, and Asian-Americans 1% -- numbers that are all way below a representative sample of the population of the country. One Native American was a guest during the six-month period: Fenton Rexford, an Inupiat village president who supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

NewsHour also expresses a partisan bias, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats two to one, a ratio out of proportion to the national reality. One so-called third party representative, Letitia James, is a New York City Council member of the Working Families Party.

?Are you on NewsHour?s Guestlist?? provides in-depth case studies of NewsHour?s coverage of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and immigration. In terms of the discussion of the occupation of Iraq, guests were overwhelmingly pro-war: 71% demonstrated an explicit pro-war stance, while only 3% expressed opposition. Among the U.S. guests who addressed Iraq, 88% where white and 90% were men. Overall, white male U.S. sources made up 66% of all sources on Iraq, while Iraqis sources accounted for only 15% and guests from other countries only 3%.

One of the more startling highlights was that the diversity of guests during the period studied was higher than it might have been during a different period. NewsHour?s coverage of Hurricane Katrina accounted for many women and African-American guests representing the general public. Their inclusion further dilutes the total percentage of non-white male guests presented as experts. Hurricane Katrina was the subject of 6% of all NewsHour segments, but a full 46% of all African-Americans guests on NewsHour appeared in Katrina segments. More than half of the African Americans presented in the Katrina stories were members of the general public as opposed to experts.

Another factor tipping the diversity numbers is two prominent Bush administration appointments: Condoleezza Rice appeared 21 times and made up almost 13% of all African-Americans during the study; and Alberto Gonzales appeared 11 times and accounted for more than 30% of all Latino sources.

As the title of the study makes clear, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer falls short of living up to high standards of inclusion and diversity that is the mandate of public broadcasting. Like most commercial television news products, NewsHour reflects the bias and opinions of the content owners, which in this case is a corporation called Liberty Media, not PBS. The findings of ?Are You on the NewsHour?s Guestlist?? further reinforce the need for locally produced, non-commercial community media that creates a space for the distribution of a wider spectrum of views and opinions instead of commercial programming that reflects the goals and values of an elite minority.

Nick Hess is Vice President of Public Access of Indianapolis