The Sunday morning political talk show circuit looks like it will be diversified quite a bit this year. Women like Christiane Amanpour and Candy Crowley -- hosts of ABC's This Week and CNN's State of the Union respectively -- will now be joined by Rev. Al Sharpton who announced the launch of his own program yesterday.

The Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond reports:

The Rev. Al Sharpton has created his own media company and will launch a Sunday-morning syndicated TV show, he told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday.

The controversial civil rights advocate will unveil his 30-minute show, “Education Superhighway,” Thursday morning at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 40th Annual Legislative Conference. It's already cleared in 150 markets, including KCOP in Los Angeles.

Sharpton's media company, ESH Holdings (named after the series' initials) will produce the TV show as well as a planned print magazine.

The TV show, which begins airing Sept. 26, consists of news and roundtable discussions primarily about education. Guests already lined up include Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten.

On the New York Times' Media Decoder blog, Brian Stelter reported this weekend on the lack of Sunday show diversity writing:

It is a perennial complaint about American television news: that the guests on the Sunday morning public affairs programs are not representative of the country's diversity.

A new study says the guest bookings do not represent the population of Congress, either.

“In 2009 the talk shows told us (by their selection of Congressional guests) that the people who matter are disproportionately white, male, senior and Republican — disproportionate not just when compared to the American population overall, but also when compared to the population of Congress itself,” concluded a study published this month in The Green Bag, a quarterly journal supported by the George Mason University School of Law.

In June, Politico reported that a study by American University's Women & Politics Institute found that “female lawmakers have composed 13.5 percent of the total Sunday show appearances by all representatives and senators this year.”

A year earlier, The Hill reported on complaints by the Congressional Black Caucus about the lack of diversity on the Sunday shows.

Media Matters has previously noted the stunning lack of gender, ethnic, and ideological diversity on the Sunday morning political talk shows. A 2007 report on the subject noted, “Not only are the Sunday morning talk shows on the broadcast networks dominated by conservative opinion and commentary, the four programs -- NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday -- feature guest lists that are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male." The hosts too were all white and male.