Sign on! DSA Launches Petition Demanding WAMC's 'Roundtable' Include Palestinians!

Petition calls for WAMC to enforce its own policies on inclusion and fairness

By James Earl Owens, February 21, 2025

I am happy to report that Berkshires Democratic Socialists of America launched a petition and email campaign demanding an end to discriminatory exclusion of Palestinian sources by producers of The Roundtable, a publicly funded program on NPR affiliate WAMC, serving upstate New York and six other states. The actions by the Berkshire DSA provide new means for listeners, community members, and organizations to address a 15-month pattern of discrimination by Roundtable producers. That pattern of discrimination was publicly documented by recent posts on JamesEarlOwensPhD.com. Full disclosure, I am a member of DSA and helped draft of the petition.

The petition demands, “WAMC and the producers of The Roundtable [must] diversify their coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Fairness requires balancing institutional sources with regular inclusion of those affected by their policies, namely Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans. In line with WAMC’s own fairness policies, WAMC must include Palestinian perspectives.”

The petition further states, “during the 15 months following the start of Israel’s War on Gaza, producers of WMAC’s The Roundtable have failed to include a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American panelist. Producers Sarah LaDuke and Joe Donahue have rejected and ignored numerous requests from Palestinian-American sources ready to appear on the show.”

The petition and email campaign is a rare opportunity to act in defense of diversity and fairness in the era of Trump’s aspiration to a monarchic, fascist, authoritarianism. Palestinian-American perspectives are needed more than ever to counter the sadly bipartisan notion of Palestinians as un-American, antisemitic, and unworthy of inclusion in political discussions. Biden characterized pro-Palestine protests as “un-American” and “antisemitism” involving “threats of violence against Jewish students”. Trump’s 1/30 executive order goes further, using the term “pro-jihadist protests” and extending the smear to “anti-American colleges and universities”.

Exclusion of Palestinians on The Roundtable exemplifies how liberal media defense of Democrat’s pro-Israel US policies actually enables Trump’s political aims not just to ethnically cleanse Gaza but to destroy the US academic system.¹ As Palestinian-American journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote (The Guardian, 2/6/2025), one “reason Trump can spew this ‘fanatical bullshit’ is because much of the western media have been complicit in dehumanizing Palestinians and normalizing what many experts have termed a genocide.”

Help transform The Roundtable into a forum for ethnic, racial, and gender diversity but also ideological diversity. We need such a place to hear each other and work together on the difficult task of saving our democracy. Please sign the petition. Join the email campaign here or send WAMC an email here or using the addresses below.

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. As Yale’s Jason Stanley, author of Erasing History; How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, said earlier today, “The United States has the world’s greatest system of higher education. . . . What the Trump administration is trying to do is take this system down.”