All-White panels were the norm last year: Racial politics of WAMC’s The Roundtable
All-White panels were the norm last year: Racial politics of WAMC’s The Roundtable
Racial diversity also declined over the last year. Sorry. I’m just the messenger.
Cartoon by the amazing Davian Chester, known for his awesome series @Real_Toons.
Some Roundtable listeners may think the above cartoon is a gross overstatement and thus mean-spirited. But, as the data I release in this post shows, during the last year of episodes, all-White panels are the overwhelming norm on The Roundtable. This post will also show that daily racial diversity on the program declined over the year.1 (If you doubt my findings, please check out my data, which I link to at the end of this post.)
How well is The Roundtable implementing WAMC’s diversification policy?
Assessing the rate of daily racial inclusion on The Roundtable is important to inform how well program producers implement WAMC’s (federally mandated) policies on diversity, which call for “[d]iversifying our workplace, content, and audiences” and to “practices that are designed to fulfill the station’s commitment to diversity”. Casual observations might perceive The Roundtable as clearly dedicated to those policies. After all, the program recently hosted at least 4 special episodes prominently featuring non-White panelists (9/18, 9/19, 9/26, 10/8). On one such episode (the 9/19/24 panel on DEI, no less), regular Roundtable panelist Nic Rangel2 affirmed progress in racial inclusion on the show. “The Roundtable has gotten much more diverse in the last year, year and a half,” she stated.3 I wish I knew what informed her hopeful conclusion.
Obviously, it is important to try to clarify what is going on. The measures I provide help inform not only Rangel’s conclusion but also the extent to which Roundtable production practices tend to fulfill WAMC’s diversification policies — or tend to reinforce Whiteness as a more objective news perspective than the many other racial/ethnic perspectives of the broadcast area.
This is the second post in a series presenting findings from my data-driven study of a full-year (10/9/23 - 10/8/2024) of episodes on The Roundtable. The Roundtable is produced by the publicly funded NPR-affiliated radio station, WAMC, and reaches some 30,000 daily listeners in 7 US Northeast states, according to Nielsen data. Today’s post uncovers patterns in daily racial inclusion on Roundtable panels. Rates of daily inclusion are first important because they indicate which racial groups most consistently spoke on daily issues and thereby acquired greater power to address unfolding issues. Second, patterns of inclusion help shape ideological expectations about which groups legitimately belong in political discussions — and which groups do not.4
My data covers the 232 consecutive episodes spanning 10/9/23 – 10/8/24 and codes for these variables: the names of all 71 panelists who appeared on the show during the time range, their racial and ethnic identities, the specific episodes on which they appeared, and the per-episode racial proportion among panelists. This data enables me to provide counts of the total number of episodes featuring all-White panels, all-non-White panels, and all varieties of mixed-race panels in between. I then use this data for two additional purposes. First, I track changes in average inclusion on daily panels over time and, second, I compare rates of daily inclusion with the racial demographics of WAMC’s 37-some county broadcast area and its hometown of Albany, New York.
All-White panels are the norm on The Roundtable
The data shows that all-White panels are the overwhelming norm for The Roundtable. As Figure 1 shows, all-white panels made up 68% (157/232) of Roundtable panels that aired over the past year (10/9/23 - 10/08/24). The remaining 32% of panels including non-White perspectives almost invariably involved White dominated panels: The 65 White majority panels made up 28% of episodes, compared with the 3 non-White majority panels that made up less than 2% of episodes. Only 7 panels featured equal White/non-White inclusion. The number of all-non-White panels over the past year is zero (0). This means 222 episodes featured majority or all-White panels while only 10 featured equal or majority non-White panels.
Figure 1.
Measures of average (mean=88% White, median=100% White, mode=100% White) also emphasize the overriding pattern of 100% White panels on The Roundtable. However, the best way to determine if a value is outside the norm is to calculate standard deviations from the mean, or z-score. Average z-scores5 for the 50% White panels and majority non-White panels (33% White, 20% White) are 1.8, 2.3, and 2.9 respectively which (for this data) means they lie outside of 96% of the data.6 This means equal racial parity on Roundtable panels (let alone non-White majority) constitutes a minor (<5%) deviation from the normal pattern of all-White panels. So, average daily diversity on The Roundtable is skewed pretty badly towards Whites. But, as Nic Rangel suggested, perhaps racial diversity is getting better on The Roundtable? The data does not support her hypothesis.
Data shows varying levels of average White dominance, with diversity slightly declining overall
Diversity on The Roundtable varied over the past year but declined overall. Dividing the data on daily diversity into segments of time enables observation of shifts in racial inclusion patterns. I below offer two ways of dividing the data to fairly search for efforts at racial inclusion over time.
First, I simply divide the data by even numbers of episodes. The total set of episodes numbers 232, so even-division into seasonal segments results in 4 sets of 58 episodes (Figure 2). This division of data shows average White proportions on daily panels rising from just over 85% in fall 2023, to 87% in the spring, to a high of 94% in the summer, and then declining to 90% at the end of the annual cycle. This data perspective finds a 5% increase in White inclusion over the year.
Figure 2.
Second, I divide the data by obviously significant news-events that heightened the newsworthy importance of perspectives of panelists of color (Figure 3). The first time-segment begins on 10/9/23 (the first Roundtable episode after the 10/7 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad) and ends on 1/25/24 with the ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel was plausibly committing genocide (and needed to implement specific protocols in order to prevent genocide). The second segment runs from the following day, 1/26/24, to 5/2/24 and the violent repression of US student protests against the Gaza war and related US policy of support for that war. The third time segment runs from 5/3/24 to 8/30/24, that is, from new polling indications of historic opposition to US-Israel policy and Israel’s massive war, through the rise of ‘uncommitted’ voting blocs and delegates, to the highly contested Democratic National Convention which excluded elected Palestinian-American members of the Democratic party from speaking on the main stage but included Israeli-Americans not elected to office. The fourth segment runs to the anniversary of the 10/7 attacks.
Figure 3.
This division of data shows less of a decrease in diversity by year’s end because the final time-segment coincides with a shift in Roundtable practices. I documented that shift in my previous findings that found Roundtable producers added 8 new panelists of color in the five weeks starting September 2024 — an 80% increase in diversity over the 10 such panelists appearing over prior 11-months! Nonetheless, September’s increase in panelists only slightly improves the pattern of racial inclusion over time. Even from this more favorable view, White dominance on daily panels rose from 85% to 93% then fell to 88%, marking a 3% decline in racial diversity over the year. (Remember there is no margin of error for these numbers as they are not based on sample data but from the full-year population of Roundtable episodes.)
Put in context, as the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank climbed to over 41,000, as late April polls showed an astounding 95% of Blacks opposed unquestioned US support for Israel’s war policy, and as Donald Trump and the GOP made opposition to immigrants their perhaps central campaign issue, The Roundtable decreased inclusion of Blacks and Latino/a sources and maintained exclusions of Palestinians and American Indians. This imbalance resulted in a total lack of perspective from American Indians, who may provide the determining votes in swing states (ABC/AP News, 10/26/2024). These practices also resulted in skewed Roundtable coverage of the Republican National Convention where overwhelmingly White crowds waved “Mass deportation now” signs and chanting “send them back”. Episodes covering the convention consisted of 19 White panelists and 1 non-White panelist, Dr. Jennifer Burns of UAlbany’s Department of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.7
These findings on shifting rates of daily racial inclusion also provide a basis of comparison with the racial demography of WAMC’s listening area and its home base community of Albany, NY. My next post will present that comparison and show White representation on The Roundtable disproportionately exceeded White presence in both those geographic zones.
Conclusion: normal pattern of all-White panels, and declining presence of non-Whites, belies WAMC’s claimed diversification policies
Prior findings in this series focused on the accumulation of appearances of racial groups on The Roundtable over the past year and found Whites appeared 7 times more often than all other racial/ethnic groups combined. Today’s post instead looked at daily racial inclusion and found all-White panels to be the overwhelming normal pattern on The Roundtable. Non-White inclusion, I showed, normally occurred as part of majority White panels, with racially balanced and non-White majority panels combined taking up less than 5% of episodes. I then presented two methods to search for changes in daily racial inclusion on panels over time, one of which was highly favorable to recent shifts in Roundtable sourcing practices. Both methods showed declines in diversity over the course of the year (5% and 3% respectively).
These findings indicate Roundtable producers provided White panelists with a dominant role in determining the kind of ‘objective political reality’ affirmed through the program. This notion of reality and objectivity constitute a basis The Roundtable uses to bond with White affluent listeners, upon whom the station economically depends. Yet the program and station also have responsibilities to other racial/ethnic groups, as committed to in the station’s own diversity policies.
One way Roundtable defenders could respond to these findings would be to argue that this high rate of White inclusion is acceptable as it likely hews close to the racial demography of WAMC’s broadcast area. While I reject the political logic that racial minority status delegitimizes political belonging, I will provide data to quantitively evaluate the proportionality of Roundtable daily racial inclusion.
My next post compares the daily shifting racial demographics of Roundtable panels with Census data on the 37 some counties that make up WAMC’s broadcast area. I will also compare the program’s daily racial inclusion with racial proportions of the City of Albany, NY, the hometown of The Roundtable. See you there!
Please feel free to review and criticize my data (GitHub) and my analysis of it. Post your comments below!
By providing these findings, the post informs research questions 2 and 3, which I defined in my introductory post to this series.
2a. What is the average racial balance on daily Roundtable panels?
2b. Have patterns in daily racially balance on The Roundtable shifted over time?
How do the above patterns of racial representation on The Roundtable compare with the racial demographics of WAMC’s broadcast area and its home community, the City of Albany, New York?
Executive Director of the Legal Aid Society of Northeastern New York
Rangel spoke at a live panel on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Her comment occurs at about 1:23:00 in the audio recording provided by WAMC. Rangel is one of my favorite panelists. This hurts me to single her out. (https://www.wamc.org/podcast/the-roundtable/2024-09-19/9-19-24-live-panel-at-the-linda).
Writing on racial inclusion among senior journalistic staff, Arguedas, Mukherjee, & Nielsen (2024) write, “Who occupies top editorial positions in major news organisations is of both practical and symbolic importance. To the public, people in these roles often come to represent the news organisations they lead and the media industry at large. As key figures in the leadership and direction of news outlets, top editors model what journalism can and should be.” The absence of particular racial/ethnic groups from news thus sends a message to the larger public that these groups are not needed, that is, they do not belong.
Ross Arguedas, A., Mukherjee, M., & Nielsen, R. K. (2024). Race and leadership in the news media 2024: evidence from five markets. DOI: 10.60625/risj-d119-xb11
As needed for Z-scores, I created a normal quintile plot from the profoundly negative skewed distribution of panels.
The Empirical Rule usually finds 95% of data lie within 2 standard deviations. My normalized data-set slightly varies, with 1.82 standard deviations (the average rank proportions of the 10 50% White panels) located just beyond 96% of the data.
The RNC was covered on these episodes:
7/15/2024: Jennifer Burns, Malia Du Mont, Terry Gipson, Libby Post, Mark Wittman
7/16/2024: Frederic Hof, Jim Ketterer, J.P. Miller, Mike Spain
7/17/2024: Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Robert Griffin, Anna Markowitz
7/18/2024: Ira Fusfeld, John Faso, Judy Patrick, Matt Fusfeld
7/19/2024: Theresa Bourgeois, Judith Enck, Heather Mulligan, Aaron Pacitti