Chris Hayes On Bill O'Reilly: 'I Have Watched His Show Very, Very, Very Little'

MSNBC's Chris Hayes gave a series of interviews this week, in which he talked about issues ranging from Bill O'Reilly to cable news diversity.

Cable news is notorious for its sea of white male pundits, but Hayes' "Up" has been an outlier -- the only Sunday show in its timeslot to have a majority of guests who are not white men. (That is very different, of course, from the almost all-white roster of cable news hosts, something Hayes is a part of.)

Speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review days before his new primetime show, "All In," debuts, Hayes said there's no mystery to how he's able to get such a diverse roster of guests. His show simply thinks consciously about diversity, and acts accordingly:

"We just would look at the board and say, 'We already have too many white men. We can't have more.' Really, that was it," Hayes says. "Always, constantly just counting. Monitoring the diversity of the guests along gender lines, and along race and ethnicity lines." Out of four panelists on every show, he and his booking producers ensured that at least two were women. "A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men," he says. "Often it would be less than that."

Hayes also pointed out that, by talking about issues beyond the ones that people like John McCain are interested in, you can get more diverse guests.

Hayes also spoke to NPR's Fresh Air, where he swatted away a question about his new timeslot rival, Bill O'Reilly. Hayes said he doesn't think the two shows are trying to get the same audience, and insisted he has barely seen the Fox News behemoth's program.

"I have watched his show very, very, very little," he said. "I'm positive I have never watched an hour of the O'Reilly show."