Action Alert: WAMC needs your help! Addressing WAMC’s own diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges can make the station stronger

The Roundtable's DEI forum unwittingly illuminates the unfulfilled potential of public radio to help people of all races join against authoritarianism

WAMC, and The Roundtable, should be applauded for hosting a 9/19/24 on-air panel on growing right-wing driven opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Yet station management, and The Roundtable’s producers, should also be called on to address their own issues of ethnic, racial, and political exclusion in hiring and programming. The DEI issues affecting WAMC and The Roundtable are perhaps surprising as the station and program self-brand as bases for political inclusion and racial, gender, and sexual equality. The 9/19 forum itself exemplifies management’s effort to signal their commitment to DEI to listener/members sharing those values – and to raise funds on that basis.

Those of us in the Northeast who care about public media journalism recognize its unique role in building a larger awareness of our local communities than commercial journalism, with its over-riding profit motive, can afford. Public radio, like WAMC, thus somewhat uniquely holds the potential to reach a cross-racial, geographically associated mass audience to defy the restraints on humanity imposed by what Great Barrington’s own W. E. B. Du Bois called “the color line.”

To defeat today’s dehumanizing campaigns requires renewed investment in common belonging in humanity across color lines wherever they appear. This means not only condemning right-wing racist anti-DEI efforts but helping WAMC become the kind of inclusive and diverse channel for humanitarian democratic communication that station management promised but did not provide.

WAMC’s own Community Representation Policy Statement specifies diversity commitments and goals of

1. “Diversifying our workplace, content, and audiences”,

2. defining “practices that are designed to fulfill the station’s commitment to diversity” and

3. publicly releasing “an annual report describing the station’s diversity efforts.”¹

Yet recent evidence raises concerns about WAMC’s commitment to these commitments and goals.

• WAMC has not published that annual report on its efforts to diversity some 10-months after its above pledge to do so.

• WAMC reported, but did not publicize, its 2024 demographics showing Whites made up 85% of its trustees and 92% of staff. In contrast, WAMC’s listening area² is 74% White, Albany County is 70% White,³ and the City of Albany only 50% White.⁴

• WAMC’s senior staff is 100% White.

• The above numbers do not show progress: Current WAMC board and staff numbers are actually slightly more White than in 2022. Senior staff was also 100% White in 2022.   

• WAMC’s 2023-24 federal CPB filings on hiring did not show evidence the station specifically sought out candidates of color for its journalism positions, none of which were at the senior staff level, as I reported in June.

• WAMC lacks any news staff or trustees of Middle East identity. Yet these perspectives are especially needed amid historic levels of violence in the Middle East and swelling domestic debates about Islamophobia and antisemitism. 

• The Roundtable failed to include a single panelist of Palestinian, Israeli, or Middle East/North African identity over the first 11-months of the Gaza war.

  • Worse, emails I recently published showed Sarah LaDuke and Joe Donahue rejected sources from these groups who were willing to appear on the show.

• The Roundtable features only marginal inclusion of people of color. My forthcoming review of 205 consecutive episodes starting 10/9/23 shows Whites filled 89% of seats on panels compared to the 74% White presence of WAMC’s listening area.

WAMC, according to 2019 Nielsen reporting, relies on a White affluent over-65 demographic. That audience is not sustainable in the long-term. For ethical and practical reasons, but most of all to give voice to the diverse and inclusive communities that constitutes the basis of political democracy against fascism and authoritarianism, WAMC must diversify.

Producers at the Roundtable show they have the ability to attract more guests of color by that fact the 9/19 DEI event features such 3 panelists who have not appeared on any other episodes since at least 10/7/23.⁵ What is sorely needed is for listeners to make plain that we recognize the crucial political importance of greater diversity on WAMC and The Roundtable at this watershed historical moment.

What can we, as listeners who care about the future of WAMC, do to empower the station to re-commit to its goals of “Diversifying our workplace, content, and audiences”? 

Those who care about the future of WAMC can call on station managers to

1. Publicly release its diversification strategy and goals, as pledged last November.

2. Publish its annual report on its practices to fulfill its diversification goals, also as pledged last November.

3. Conduct a senior staff/management level job search for a journalist of color and empower them to conduct outreach to communities of color in the listening area, including Palestinian and MENA communities, to learn their interests and needs, create content addressing those needs, and thereby expand the listener base.

4. Recruit leaders from communities of color to serve on WAMC’s board.

5. Recruit Palestinian and pro-Palestinian panelists for The Roundtable.

6. Recruit more people of color panelists for The Roundtable.

Seven years ago esteemed civil rights leader Barbara Smith, then a regular Roundtable panelist, went public to reveal The Roundtable repeatedly passed over her recommended Latino/a, Muslim, Trans, and Black panelists for Whites and did so in the immediate wake of White supremacist violence at Charlottsville. “I have never willingly supported tokenism or racial segregation. As a matter of principle I decided to leave,” she stated at the time. While listeners did not act on her warnings then, we have a historic opportunity to do so at this historic moment today.

WAMC’s new CEO Sarah Gilbert can be reached at sgilbert@wamc.org

The Roundtable’s producer Sarah LaDuke can be reached at sladuke@wamc.org

Roundtable host Joe Donahue can be reached at jdonahue@wamc.org

1. The policy statement states the station will “assess . . . diversity of WAMC radio content to align with the goal of audience diversification” and will establish with trustees “practices that are designed to fulfill the station’s commitment to diversity and to meet the applicable FCC guidelines.”

2. WAMC’s broadcast area encompasses an area of some 37 counties across seven states. US Census (American Community Survey 5-year) data on those counties from the Census tool, Social Explorer, shows a population of almost 9 million of whom 74% report as White alone.

3. According to 2022 US Census ACS, 5-year,  Albany, Co. NY, Data USA

4. According to 2022 US Census ACS, 5-year, Albany, NY, Data USA

5. Those new panelists of color are Alfredo Medina Jr. PhD, Jaye Holly, Anzola Alozie.