"The Peoples Roundtable" event showcases critical local voices rarely included in local news
Sunday, July 26, 2026, 2pm at YouthFX in Albany
Readers of this blog care about racial and political diversity on local media, especially when that media is funded by listeners and by our tax dollars. Readers of this blog have helped put pressure on our leading public radio station, WAMC to address its diversity problem. Recent events like racial justice and anti-genocide activists crashing the WAMC fund drive phone lines, or the over 1,000 emails generated by our campaigns, made station management perfectly aware that there are many many listeners DEMANDING CHANGE! But we can’t just wait for WAMC management to do the right thing and address the serious inclusion problems on the station’s flagship news panel program, The Roundtable.
The Truth and Justice for Palestine (TJ4P) coalition is instead creating ways to raise the voices and perspectives marginalized or excluded from The Roundtable, and from most mainstream media. This Sunday, July 26, TJ4P will host “The People’s Roundtable,” a public panel and media discussion that will highlight the precise sorts of panelists regularly missing in regional public broadcasting. The event will be held at YouthFX Theater, 25 Warren St. (between. Phillip & Grand St.) Albany, NY 12202.
The program will be hosted by Barbara Smith, an author, former Albany Common Council Member She is also a former WAMC Roundtable panelist who resigned in protest of the program’s racist editorial policies. Scheduled panelists:
Eduardo Rodriguez (Journalist/Editor/Organizer/Educator with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ALBA Movimientos, People’s Dispatch, Al-Akhbar English, and Liberation News
Canyon Ryan (Executive Director at United Tenants of Albany, Board member of Tenant’s PAC)
Lacey Wilson (Underground Railroad Education Center/National Council of Public History/United Tenants of Albany)
