WAMC’s The Roundtable: Why listen to it, let alone study it?
On the perhaps surprising political importance of the program and station to the development of the Democratic Party and its policies on Israel
This blog offers a new space to discuss The Roundtable, the prominent publicly produced daily morning news panel program on NPR’s northeast regional affiliate, WAMC. I hope to hear comments from people who listen regularly and care about the program as well as from those who wish for changes – such as to expand the racial, ethnic, and political viewpoints included among panelists. I am among those who listen regularly and wish for changes to the program. In this post I explore, and invite comments on, the political importance of the program and the station in local understandings of the Palestine/Israel crisis, voting, and the relations between the Democratic Party, pro-Israel organizations, and the state of Israel.
We crucially need a truly “round” Roundtable at this historic moment, with Gaza’s social and medical infrastructure destroyed, tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, 1.7 million displaced and facing growing famine, as well as 120 Israeli hostages held by Hamas. What I mean is, we need a broadly inclusive, widely heard, publicly produced program to enable diverse voices to discuss these complex and heartrending events in Israel/Palestine and the political turmoil it has fomented in the US. My call for greater diversity on The Roundtable mirrors the station’s own goals, as stated in its CPB mandated “Community Representation Policy Statement”: “In our journalism, diversity means the inclusion in our reporting of the vastly different voices and opinions of mis or under-represented people and those often ignored.”
I previously explored the question of whether The Roundtable provides that kind of diversity and found evidence suggesting it did not. (During the crucial two-week period surrounding the peak of campus protests, The Roundtable included zero Palestinian or Arab panelists. Whites constituted 93% of all panelists and Black, Indigenous, persons of color only 7%. Nearly half of panelists were Democratic party insiders and 80% of subject matter experts on the Middle East were US military insiders. Zero panelists were from international human rights or aid organizations or from student organizations.)
This post explores a different question: why is The Roundtable worth studying and arguing about? As I will show in this post, first, the show reaches a geographic area of voters who are surprisingly important to the US-Israel relationship. Second, unlike commercial stations, WAMC depends financially on the goodwill donations of local listeners and small-business underwriters but also on Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding that requires diversity in program content. My point is thus two-fold: first, The Roundtable contributes to opinion formation and collective action in a region where voters could affect relations between the Democratic Party, Israel, and Israel-lobby1 groups; second, the host station, WAMC, is financially vulnerable to local opinion and financially required to fulfill diversity standards. Collective pressure from local communities concerned over the horrific violence imposed on the Palestinians -- what the International Court of Justice calls a plausible genocide – could successfully invite The Roundtable to include panelists from Palestinian and Arab groups, human rights and aid organizations, and those with international legal expertise to dialogue with the station’s important voting base. This post explains my arguments and starts with the political importance of the station and its audience. Your responses and critiques to these arguments will help create new common understandings that hopefully encourage collective action to improve the station and its prominent daytime panel discussion program, The Roundtable.
Why study The Roundtable?: WAMC’s political importance in local knowledge production
The Roundtable (RT) is worthy of study, first of all, for its audience reach and its coverage across several states. RT is a daily talk program on a station reaching hundreds of thousands of listeners per month. As the station reports, “WAMC's listening area reaches parts of seven states, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; as well as parts of Canada. With over 400,000 monthly listeners, WAMC ranks among the most-listened-to public radio stations in the United States” (WAMC, 10/20/20232). The station also demonstrates powerful fundraising capacities, for example drawing over $1.25M in donations in a recent 4 day period (WAMC, 2/23/2024). The station reported some $7.3M in revenue for 2022 including some $2.6M in underwriting, according to its tax documents (WAMC Form 990, 20223). (Unfortunately, those documents do not itemize donor amounts or state which donors contribute to which programs.) In short, the station reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners across multiple states where hundreds of businesses contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to support programming. Underwriters, in fact, pay extra for spots on RT, according to the latest WAMC rate sheet in which RT spot prices are 60% above the median program rate. WAMC’s geographic reach and base of loyal,4 often financially contributing, individual and business listeners makes the station’s prominent daytime news panel program, RT, an important and seemingly respected source for truth and diverse perspectives on key political topics.
Figure 1. Coverage map of WAMC
Source: Partner with WAMC, underwriter outreach document, retrieved April, 2024.
WAMC is additionally worth studying as an important local communication force that connects local affluent groups and businesses and shapes their awareness of each other. According to the station’s webpages for underwriters, “Our listeners are affluent, highly educated, leaders in their communities, decision makers in their professions and have a disposable income” (WAMC Underwriting, Home, 2024). The station draws more than 30,000 weekly listeners in and around Albany, New York’s capital, according to Nielsen data for 2018-19. New York politicians also find the station’s audience valuable. Elected officials regularly participate on RT’s other segment, Congressional Corner, which provides a non-combative one-on-one format for elected officials to share their views with this desired audience who is more likely to vote than less affluent, less educated groups (Figure 2). As a 2023 Pew Research study finds, “Adults with a college degree made up 43% of voters in 2022, but only 25% of nonvoters. Those without a college degree made up 56% of voters, but 74% of nonvoters.” As an affluent and influential social group who also likely vote at above-average rates, WAMC listeners occupy a position to potentially influence state level elections and thus also influence the policies of Democratic and Republican candidates. Perhaps less often recognized is that these same New York voters exercise potentially important influence over Democratic policy on Israel and Palestine.
Figure 2. Disparities in voting by age, race and education
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/
New York voters’ potentially outsize influence on Democratic Party relations with Israel lobby groups
The New York state Democratic party is an important force in organizing relations between pro-Israel organizations and the Democratic party nationally, as New York Focus reported (10/19/2023). Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo authorized in 2019 a “wide ranging series of economic development partnerships between New York State and Israel in industries including UAV/drones, transportation, energy, cybersecurity, financial technology and health care” (Cuomo Press Release, 7/1/2019). Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, continues those commitments but also acted to help build Israel’s military arsenal following the 10/7 attacks, such as publicly urging federal lawmakers urging increased military aid (Gov. Hochul, 10/16/2023). She also acted to hinder student opposition to Israeli policy by calling on state college and university presidents to discipline antisemitic but not Islamophobic campus speech (Gov. Hochul, 12/9/2023). New York Senator Chuck Schumer used his position as Majority Leader to help pass some $35B in military aid to Israel (AP, 2/8/2023). State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli ordered purchase of $20M in Israeli bonds by 10/13 of last year. Among other pro-Israel efforts, Democratic organizers joined with Republicans to launch the ‘Solidarity PAC’ as “a state-level analog to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee” (New York Focus, 3/26/2024) that would “target[] far-left Assembly candidates” (Jewish Insider, 4/4/2024). NY State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani went so far as to say, “New York is the center point of the relationship between the United States and Israel” (New York Focus, 10/19/2023).
Yet these politicians are vulnerable to shifts in popular opinion, as demonstrated by Hochul having to stand up to a growing list of Democratic state officials calling for ceasefire (City and State NY, 3/28/24) and Schumer publicly criticizing Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (AP, 3/16/24). Such shifts in party allegiance among New York voters occurred in the 2022 midterm elections in which many districts supported Republican congressional candidates after supporting Biden 2 years earlier. As the map below (Figure 3) shows, some of those districts are in the WAMC listening range. I am not saying that WAMC is responsible for the rightward shift in the 2022 midterms. (LOL.) I am saying that the station’s flow of perspectives and information intervenes in a larger opinion making environment in which voters from the right and left challenge established Democratic candidates and policies. The question is, in what way is WAMC strategically responding to this shifting opinion, action, and voting environment?
Figure 3. Change in New York vote share between presidential election 2020 and midterms 2022
Source: BBC Data Journalism Team, 11/23/2022
My prior investigation of RT’s prominent sourcing of New York state Democratic Party insiders and exclusion of Arab, Palestinian and other likely critics of US-Israel policies provide some evidence that WAMC’s strategy hews close to that of the NY state Democratic leaders. The 2022 New York state Democratic defeats followed the party leadership’s strategy of centrist, anti-progressive, campaigning (TheIntercept, 11/12/2022). That strategy seems a likely reason for the defeats, especially given that the same election saw wins for some New York progressive candidates, such as Democratic Socialist Sarahana Shrestha in New York’s 103rd district which includes Kingston NY served by WAMC affiliate WAMK. Following the 2022 election, polls show shifts in opinion among Democrats towards greater support for the Palestinians (Gallup, 3/14/2023) and even a growing 25% perception of Israel as an apartheid state among Jewish-American voters (The Forward, 7/15/20215). New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s own recent critique of Israel’s Netanyahu administration addressed this growing young Jewish voting bloc who reject Israel’s occupation policies. Peter Beinart, editor at large of Jewish Currents, described Schumer’s remarks as “the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change” (New York Times, 3/22/2024). Recalling that the constituents who compelled Schumer to address their changing opinions of Israel are New Yorkers, and that many live in WAMC’s coverage area, reminds us that WAMC too faces a choice in how to respond and address this new reality of the growing Democratic power of progressives and young adults who reject the established Israel narrative. Studying RT provides a view on the choices WAMC pursues in relation to these agentive audiences. What is the role that RT performs in response to this ‘profoundly changing’ Democratic party constituency – especially since New York is home to the largest population of Jewish people in the country?
I argue that WAMC sourcing practices intervene in this larger process of political opinion formation and voting by expanding or limiting the range of available narratives and factual analyses that listeners use to construct beliefs and take political actions, like voting, contacting legislators, protesting, etc. More specifically, I argue that WAMC’s sourcing practices demonstrate the agency of program producers, station trustees, and others whose choices about who to include on RT demonstrate strategic choices about how to intervene in this larger political field.
WAMC programs like The Roundtable serve a region with outsize influence over Democratic policies and provides these politically influential local households and businesses with information and viewpoints that can affect popular support for state and national policies regarding Israel and Palestine. The station should provide those voters with a range of experts reflecting the ‘profound change’ among Democrats, younger voters, American Jews, as well as Arab and Muslim voters. Such experts could provide, and debate, factual and historical contexts of the conflict, the aspirations of Palestinian and Israeli people. Again, the approach I call for seems perfectly in keeping with the station’s own diversity and inclusion goals which name “under-represented people” as well as “race and ethnicity . . . faith . . . political affiliation” among the categories of diversity to enable “content [that] will continually evolve and ultimately be unbiased.” Those goals are requirements for funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – from which WAMC receives some $400k annually – and as such should constitute a standard to evaluate program content, such as on The Roundtable. My limited evaluation of that content shows discriminatory exclusion of Palestinian and Arab people, of students and expert critics of standing US-Israel policy. The former groups clearly within WAMC’s stated diversity categories of “race and ethnicity”, “political affiliation”, and “under-represented people”. Actual diversification of RT program panelists is a step toward fulfilling the station’s own stated diversity and inclusion goals but is also a step toward addressing WAMC’s existential need to attract a larger, younger, and more diverse audience to the station.
Yet, as I explore in my next post, if WAMC follows NPR’s racialized economic strategy of designing programming to appeal to affluent white audiences then sourcing practices will likely marginalize non-white voices such as Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, and progressives who challenge representations of the state of Israel cherished by centrist Democratic Party leaders and older Jewish audiences. My next post will explore the racial political economy conditioning NPR and WAMC.
This is not an anti-Semitic code word for Jewish. Many Jewish organizations oppose Israeli policy on Palestine and some groups who lobby for Israel’s current policies are not Jewish. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/a-statement-from-jewish-americans-opposing-aipac/, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/truth-many-evangelical-christians-support-israel-rcna121481
“WAMC reaches its $1 million goal in under five days”, https://www.wamc.org/news/2023-10-20/wamc-reaches-its-1-million-goal-in-under-five-days
“84% OF WAMC LISTENERS prefer WAMC over all other radio stations”, p. 4, Partner with WAMC, underwriter outreach document, retrieved April, 2024.
A 2021 poll of Jewish-American voters found some 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”. https://forward.com/news/473044/what-if-a-quarter-of-jews-really-do-think-israel-is-a-genocidal-apartheid