Palestinian exclusion on WAMC's 'The Roundtable' is likely editorial policy, part 2: Data shows bias towards Dems and military sources
Roundtable producers included Dems and US military sources hundreds of times but excluded Palestinians and ignored their requests to appear
February 18, 2025, by James Earl Owens, PhD
Referenced data is available at the end of this post.1
New evidence, made public here and a prior post, shows WAMC’s signature daytime program The Roundtable likely enforces a discriminatory policy against Palestinian and Middle East/North African (MENA) people. The first post shows Roundtable producer Sarah LaDuke and host Joe Donahue completely excluded Palestinian panelists across all episodes since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza (10/9/23 - 1/24/25), refused to dialogue with Palestinians seeking to appear, and apparently removed social media criticism of those problems. While the last post shows whom LaDuke and Donahue chose to exclude, this post shows whom they chose to include.
During the same period LaDuke and Donahue excluded Palestinian guests, LaDuke and Donahue prominently including guests currently or formerly working for key US political institutions providing political and material support for Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. Those institutions include the Democratic and Republican parties as well as the Pentagon, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security, defense funded think-tanks and PR firms. One guest, Robert Griffin, even currently partners with a branch of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Leah Penniman, along with 3 Palestinian-Americans, requested in October 2024 that LaDuke and Donahue include them on the show. Penniman is the author of Farming While Black and co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Soul Fire Farm, a 501c3 New York nonprofit agricultural education organization. Recognizable mainstream news outlets find her credible. She’s been a guest on other NPR-affiliates — check out her interviews on KCRW and KUAF. She also authored an op-ed for The LA Times. Local news outlets, like Central New York’s Spectrum News, find her work on climate change newsworthy — as do other local and national media.
Yet, as my previous post documents, LaDuke and Donahue refused to respond to her request for inclusion on The Roundtable. Twice.
Penniman told me why she sought to appear on the show. “As a Jewish person and nonprofit leader in the food justice movement, I stepped forward to be interviewed on [Roundtable] in hopes of bringing our community's nuanced ethical framework to the conversation.” She said she hoped to raise issues regarding “the integrity of international law, the universal declaration of human rights, as well as our core values as Jews and members of all faiths.”
Penniman explained that participation on The Roundtable was, for her, a way to build discussions that recognize common belonging in humanity. “There is a way forward where all of our safety and dignity is intertwined, but we won't get there if we are not able to start with open discussion.” Unfortunately, the data I present strongly suggests that LaDuke and Donahue may view “open discussion” as a threat to the institutional interests heavily represented on the show.
15-months of Roundtable data: Zero Palestinian appearances, hundreds of appearances by Dems and sources with military/intelligence backgrounds
Data published in my prior post shows The Roundtable included zero (0) Palestinians among the 1011 appearances panelists made across 293 episodes spanning the entire war on Gaza, which the ICJ ruled a probable genocide and for which the ICC seeks arrest of Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes. While Roundtable producers did include Middle East/North African panelists in September, 2024, their 4 total appearances starkly contrast with the hundreds of appearances by panelists from the Democratic and Republican parties and US military and intelligence institutions.
Data findings I: Democrats, who spent last year attacking pro-Palestine critics of Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, made 40% of Roundtable appearances
Democratic officials and employees made up a very large share of all appearances on The Roundtable during the first year of the Gaza war — and an even larger share since. As Diagram 1 shows, elected and employed officials from the NY Democratic Party made 40% (n=314) of appearances on Roundtable last year and 45% (n=98) so far this year. GOP panelists made about 5% of appearances in both periods. This includes panelist Libby Post, a Jewish long time New York State Democratic party consultant2 and LGBTQ activist, and GOP former Congressman John Faso, who received a $500,000 PAC donation from pro-Israel businessman Paul Singer.3 Both are outspoken advocates for Israel’s war policy. Post appeared 64 times since the start of the Israel-Gaza war and Faso 17 times. This spans a period when NY Democratic Party leaders united to maintain political and material support for Israel and to quell pro-Palestine organizing. The Roundtable provided a forum for these political party insiders to promote their narratives without pushback or correction from the very groups they targeted with damaging mischaracterizations.
Diagram 1
For example, Faso and Post participated in the 4/22/24 panel which unanimously agreed — without offering any evidence — that pro-Palestine student protests were antisemitic in character. The only seeming disagreement concerned which policy college administrators should implement to repress or control the speech of pro-Palestine students. Libby Post stated, again without evidence, that “students are writing swastikas on whiteboards all over the country.” The following day (4/23/24), panelist JP Miller, former finance director for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, stated “I think sometimes protesters like to be arrested.”
Contradicting these narratives of irresponsible antisemitic students seeking their own repression, on-the-ground reporting from experienced journalists4 as well as many student journalists5 documented the intense violence police and Zionist mobs unleashed on students. On neither panel did Roundtable producers a single Palestinian, MENA, or pro-Palestine student representative to correct these false characterizations.
Data findings II: Roundtable producers overwhelmingly rely on Middle East experts from the very institutions that implement US military support for Isreal’s war on Gaza
LaDuke and Donahue also most often rely on 4 Middle East experts whose knowledge and experience largely comes from work in the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or even the Israeli Defense Forces, as Table 1 shows. These defense-connected panelists are Malia Du Mont, Frederic Hof, Jim Ketterer, and Robert Griffin.
Table 1: Occupational relations of recurring Roundtable panelists with Middle East subject matter experts
A closer look at The Roundtable’s regular Middle East experts
Panelist Malia Du Mont, according to her bio at the Stimson Center, “spent the majority of her career in the Pentagon, where she held multiple civilian and military positions, including Director of Strategy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). In that role, she managed implementation of the National Defense Strategy.” Du Mont and Frederic Hof were both fellows at the Atlantic Council, a non-profit think tank funded by weapons makers and providing private consultancy with US security policymakers.6 Hof also facilitates Bard College’s relations with West Point and ROTC and was president and CEO of Armitage Associates LC, a consultancy with oil and defense clients.7
Roundtable regular Jim Ketterer worked for the National Security Council as well as non-profit AMIDEAST. According to its former president, AMIDEAST stands among the “soft power products” of the US “official public diplomacy programme” (Rughe, 2017, p. 2). The organization contracts with the US State Department and USAID and is funded by weapons maker Boeing, among others.8
Perhaps most troubling, The Roundtable regularly features former Homeland Security official Robert Griffin, who currently partners with an Israeli Defense Forces agency as part of his job as a UAlbany Dean. Griffin organized multiple trips to Israel to build partnerships between SUNY Albany students and the Computer Service Directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces.9 including working with drones – a weapon Israel used against Gazans in the current war.10 Perhaps there is an episode of The Roundtable that informs listeners of Griffin’s obvious conflict of interest, but I am yet to find it.
The only recurring Roundtable panelist with expertise on the Middle East who did not work for US or Israeli military/intel organizations, or defense funded think tanks or consulting firms, was Professor Vera Eccarius-Kelly who teaches Middle East Studies at Siena College and worked with Albany’s non-profit Refugee Welcome Center.11
Independent Middle East experts outnumbered by defense connected sources
In September 2024, The Roundtable did include 4 additional Middle East experts independent of the US/Israel military industrial complex. However, independent Middle East experts appeared far less often than those with past or current work in military or intelligence organizations, as Tables 2 and 3 indicate. In the 15-months since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, these experts from the military industrial complex appeared 154 times while independent experts appeared 41 times — a ratio of 3.8 : 1. Comparing the number of expert appearances from the first-year of Roundtable’s Gaza war coverage to the first weeks of the second-year reveals an increase in the presence of defense connected experts over independent experts
Table 2: Appearances by Middle East experts by affiliation with military, intelligence organizations, 10/9/23-10/8/24
Table 3: Appearances by Middle East experts by affiliation with military, intelligence organizations, 10/9/24-01/24/25
Looking at the first-year of coverage (10/9/23-10/8/24) the ratio of military/intel/security (n = 124) to independent (n = 37) Middle East expert appearances was 3.4 : 1. For the 15 weeks since the anniversary of the war’s start (10/9/24 - 1/24/25), The Roundtable included 30 appearances by US military/intel and 4 independent Middle East experts, a ratio of 7.5 : 1. This means that Roundtable year 2 coverage, so far, more than doubled the relative presence of military connected Middle East experts over independents.
These numbers do not include recurring Roundtable guest Dr. Jim Hendler of RPI, who is not a Middle East expert but also brings an extensive background with the Pentagon. According to his resume,12 Hendler fulfilled dozens of Department of Defense roles (pp. 2-3), oversaw millions of dollars in research grants from US military entities (pp. 29-34), and received “Industrial Gifts” from weapons manufacturers valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (p. 29). Hendler appeared 27 times between 10/9/23-10/8/24 and 9 more times between 10/9/24 - 1/24/25.
Conclusion
The evidence above, and my prior post, strongly suggests a discriminatory policy against Palestinian and pro-Palestine sources enforced by Roundtable producer LaDuke and host Donahue and perhaps by WAMC management, given the two-weeks that WAMC CEO Sarah Gilbert has refused to respond to my inquiries. At the same time as LaDuke and Donahue excluded Palestinians from the show, LaDuke and Donahue heavily included Democrats and sources from the US-Israel military industrial complex. Democrats played a lead role in 2024, pushing Biden’s policy of unconditional material support for Israel’s genocidal war and attacking pro-Palestine critics of that policy. Democratic party sources and those with backgrounds in the DoD, DHS, NSC, and the IDF come from institutions tasked with designing, defending, and implementing US policy of unconditional support for Israel’s war. These are not neutral sources and so need to be balanced with representatives from the precise people and movements targeted by those institutions.
LaDuke and Donahue’s practices of source selection also provided a small number of Republicans means to showcase their anti-Palestine policies and stay relevant for future electoral campaigns (as in the case of Faso and Molinaro).
From a cynical point of view, such a discriminatory policy of exclusion against Palestinian and pro-Palestine voices makes strategic sense. By excluding Palestinian, MENA, and solidarity movement sources, LaDuke and Donahue increase the value of the program to institutional sources who seek to avoid embarrassing debates that substantively undermine their policy narratives. Party officials then stand in a position to reward that service by providing quotes and stories to WAMC reporters and to appear on ‘Congressional Corner,’ a sister segment to Roundtable’s panel show.
If you agree that WAMC needs to make The Roundtable more fair and inclusive, then you can take a simple action right now. Please join other concerned listeners and WAMC members in a letter writing campaign to station management. Increased pressure from concerned ethical people — like you — can truly be the force to expand fairness on the airwaves owned by We The People. In the face of ongoing attacks by the Trump administration on the legal and political institutions protecting equal rights, it is crucial to expand our local bases of knowledge and communication.
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
Data for this project is on GitHub. The table documenting daily panels for variables of race, ethnicity, US defense/intelligence backgrounds, and political party for 10/9/23-10/8/24 is here. The table documenting that data for 10/9/24-1/24/25 is here. The legend key for datasets is in the ReadMe file here.
Post is a paid consultant for multiple New York state Democratic campaigns. https://commservices.net/index.php/144-2/about-us/; To cite one example, NYSEC filings I reviewed show Post LLC was paid tens of thousands of dollars from Assemblyman McDonald's campaign.
Carter, Zach (August 15, 2016). "This Democrat Isn't Challenging Her Opponent To A Debate. She's Challenging A Donor To His Super PAC".
Guttman, Nathan, (8/17/2016). ‘Catskills Congressional Candidate Takes Aim at Republican Donor Paul Singer’, The Forward, https://forward.com/news/347778/catskills-congressional-candidate-takes-aim-at-republican-donor-paul-singer/.
Lennard, Natasha (2024, 5/1). ‘I’ve Covered Violent Crackdowns on Protests for 15 Years. This Police Overreaction Was Unhinged,’ The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2024/05/01/nyc-gaza-college-protests-police-outside-agitators/
Ample student reporting on the protests is available at the Columbia Journalism School website: https://journalism.columbia.edu/students-cover-columbia-protests-2024
The Atlantic Council, for example, organizes the Council Strategy Consortium: "an off-the-record forum to support the US government strategy development process, including confidential discussions of key draft US government strategy documents prior to issuance." https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/scowcroft-center-for-strategy-and-security/foresight-strategy-and-risks-initiative/strategy-consortium/
The Atlantic Council coordinates with the US Government (above) and receives funding from defense corporations: https://quincyinst.org/research/defense-contractor-funded-think-tanks-dominate-ukraine-debate/#dod-and-dod-contractor-funding-of-the-top-foreign-policy-think-tanks-in-the-united-states
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, (2/19/2024). ‘Gaza: Israel systematically uses quadcopters to kill Palestinians from a close distance,’ https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6166/Gaza:-Israel-systematically-uses-quadcopters-to-kill-Palestinians-from-a-close-distance
As the UAlbany student newspaper reported, Griffin organized multiple trips to Israel to build national security partnerships with Israeli defense tech groups: "The college’s Cybersecurity Research Center is currently partnered with The Israeli Computer Services Directorate, which leads Israel’s cyber defense efforts." Chizzek, Timothy (undated). ‘UAlbany's Questionable Relationship With Israel’, ALBANY STUDENT PRESS, https://www.albanystudentpress.online/post/ualbany-s-questionable-relationship-with-israel
The Israeli Computer Services Directorate is a body of the IDF. Gross, Judah Ari (5/14/2017). “Army beefs up cyber-defense unit as it gives up idea of unified cyber command’, The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/army-beefs-up-cyber-defense-unit-as-it-gives-up-idea-of-unified-cyber-command/
A SUNY Albany press release states, "CEHC Dean Bob Griffin also travelled to Israel for a roundtable discussion on proper military usage of UAV’s, and specifically the new CEHC drone lab. As the university’s website states, ‘The students spent six months immersing themselves in all Israel has to offer – including its unique approach to national security.’” UAlbany Press Release, (2019, 7/16). ‘CEHC Dean, Professor Join Gov. Cuomo on Solidarity Trip to Israel’, The press release described these trips and defense partnerships as “Supporting the Governor’s [Cuomo] Mission”. SUNY Albany Press Release (7/16/2019). ‘CEHC Dean, Professor Join Gov. Cuomo on Solidarity Trip to Israel’. https://www.albany.edu/news/91878.php
“Vera Eccarius-Kelly led a team of 12 AmeriCorps/Summer Scholars in collaboration with the Refugee Welcome Center (RWC), a nonprofit located in Albany’s West Hill neighborhood that produced a Digital Photo & Storytelling series titled By Us, For Us. As part of this community engaged project, she spearheaded an Ethical Social Media Policy for the nonprofit”. Siena PolSci Newsletter, Spring 2021, p. 16. https://www.siena.edu/files/resources/spring-2021-newsletter.pdf
