Hey NPR! Women Intellectuals Exist!

If you're like me, you can tell time by the NPR show playing on your radio. The nasally guffaws of Click and Clack on a Saturday morning tell me I've slept way too late. At night, BBC's World Service tells me to get in bed and turn out the light. And Intelligence Squared, the weekly "Oxford-style" debate show I have recently discovered, tells me it's time for an entertaining and thought-provoking Sunday lunch.

An entertaining, thought-provoking, male-dominated lunch, it turns out.

Intelligence Squared is an hour-long debate show whose podcast gets over 100,000 downloads each month. The show presents a proposition--for example, "Israel Can Live with a Nuclear Iran"--and brings in four to six panelists to debate it. The audience votes at the start and the end of each debate, and whichever side moves the most voters wins. The show, which airs on over 200 NPR stations--and, as of January, will air nationally on PBS--aims to "bring together the world’s leading authorities on the day’s most important issues," according to its website. But an analysis of the entire 69-debate history stretching back to 2007 reveals that the show all too often defines the "world's leading authorities" as male.

Of 69 debates, a full 29 (42%) featured all-male panels. Another 27 had only one woman on the panel. And over 91% of the debates featured panels that were either all or majority male.

By contrast, only four panels had equal numbers of male and female debaters, and a paltry two debates featured more female than male panelists. Not a single panel featured all women. Notably, one of the two debates with more women than men centered around a gendered question: "It's Wrong to Pay for Sex." And because the host and moderator is a man, listeners to shows with an evenly split panel would still hear a discussion dominated were dominated by male voices.

The show's website features a stirring tribute to the power of debate, "the cornerstone of American progress." Debates, the show proclaims,

embody our democratic ideas as a society, proving both sides of an argument offer intellectually respectable points of view. Too often we are isolated in “echo chambers,” funnels through which our opinions are reinforced by biased media outlets, personalized technology and like-minded associations. Debate challenges our own lack of objectivity, where our minds have been contaminated by conviction.

It's a worthy goal. But instead of offering robust, diverse perspectives on the most pressing questions of our time, Intelligence Squared has created its own "echo chamber," this one reverberating with the voices of men.

What's going on here? How is it that the show's producers haven't found it uncomfortable, if not embarrassing, to feature so many all-male discussions? This is a particularly puzzling question given that the production is almost entirely female, including executive producer S. Dana Wolfe.

I called up Intelligence Squared's PR contact to see if I could get some answers. Although they would not comment on the record to a freelance writer, the person I spoke with said that the extreme gender imbalance of the show's panelists is "something that has been brought to their attention."

It's reassuring that all-female production staff is aware that it's a problem for a show priding itself on "intelligent discussion" to marginalize female voices. But that awareness doesn't appear to be changing anything: Of the four upcoming debates listed on the website, two feature all male panels, one has only one woman, and the fourth has only two confirmed guests--both of whom are men.

Hey Sully! MSNBC and Fox News Are Not Equal

Andrew Sullivan loves to equate MSNBC and Fox News. They’re both “propaganda channels” that “poison our discourse,” according to Sullivan. This is, well, silly. But I would hope that, at the very least, this week's revelation of the Obama Administration’s justification for assassinating Americans abroad starts to change his view. Put simply, if MNSBC is the propaganda wing of the Obama Administration, he needs to hire himself some new mouthpieces.

First, it must be noted that it was NBC News’ Michael Isikoff who broke the story late Monday night. Within hours of posting the story, he appeared on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” to discuss the white paper; Maddow introduced the segment by explaining the lengths news organizations and the ACLU have been going to in an effort to access to the legal memo authorizing these drone strikes. Referring to the Obama Administration’s insistence that the program is legal, she said, “We know you think it’s legal. Why do you think it’s legal?”

The discussion continued on MSNBC throughout Tuesday. On the midday show “The Cycle,” the panelists erupted in a fierce debate over the wisdom and legality of Obama’s drone program. “The point here is that there’s this sort of shadow government, almost,” host Steve Kornacki warned. “It’s taking place behind the scenes, and that’s where the Obama Administration has wanted it to be.”

And then to Sully's favorite, Ed Schultz (whom he has intimated is a propagandist unworthy of comparison to even Pat Buchanan). As such, he must have been pounding the table in defense of Obama’s authority, and decrying critics as right-wing Nazi-loving fascists, right?

SCHUTLZ: I have to say, as an American citizen, we are all entitled to due process under the law. And this document gives the president the ability to act as judge, jury and executioner. I’m troubled by it. It doesn`t meet the moral or the Constitutional standard that we expect of any administration.

And I have to say that liberals have come certainly a long way to crying about the FISA court and the Patriot Act and listening in on conversations to literally taking out innocent people around the world. We’re losing the moral high ground by doing this.

And even more troubling is that there are people in Washington who are ominously silent and not questioning this process and willing to stand behind the legal opinion of the Justice Department. This is President Obama’s legacy right now. It is dangerous.

[…]

There is no due process here whatsoever.

[…]

Well, I think Democratic senators need to step out and answer if this was the Bush administration, would they be so silent.

In short, MSNBC is pretty damn outraged about the Obama Administration’s insistence that it can kill any American, anywhere, whom it deems (through a secretive process) to be a threat. Now let’s compare that to Fox News’ reaction to the biggest terrorism-related scandals of the Bush Administration, shall we?

Here are just a few examples of Fox defending Bush’s wiretapping program immediately after the New York Times revealed it (transcripts via Lexis):

HANNITY: You know, Victoria, it seems to me that the left wants it both ways. They want to be able to blame Bush any time anything happens but, on the other hand, they're not allowing him to take what seem to be clearly, obvious, commonsensical-type steps to ensure that we monitor these people that we know are out there because we already know what their intentions are.  […] There's no evidence that any law was violated in any kind. It seems like, once again, the anti-Bush "New York Times" wants to create a conspiracy where there is none. [12/16/05]

FRED BARNES: Now, I think this was an easy call for Bush. He had to choose between protecting America's national security and worrying about the privacy of somebody linked to al Qaeda, who's on the phone to some al Qaeda official overseas. I mean, that's an easy call, I think, and the president made the right one. And, and, and the civil libertarians may not, but then they've forgotten about 9/11, and (INAUDIBLE) and the fact that we are at war, or they don't care about it. [12/17/05]

KRAUTHAMMER: [Bush] wins on this. And he waived the legalities when he painted it as us and them, who do you care about? He is weak on the legalities, but I think you could make a plausible argument that you might accept it on the basis of authorization of use of force on the war against al Qaeda. It's not that strong an argument, but politically, it wins hands down. [12/19/05]

On torture, Fox hosts were big fans. Hannity repeatedly defended Bush’s torture program. Bill O’Reilly could hardly have been more enthusiastic. And Fox hosts didn’t see why Abu Ghraib was such a big deal either.

So when the Obama Administration declares power to assassinate American citizens whenever an unspecified member of the Administration declares, on some unknown piece of evidence, that the person is a threat, MSNBC hosts immediately and harshly criticize both the policy and the secrecy behind it. When the Bush Administration is revealed to have illegally spied on U.S. citizens and tortured detainees, Fox hosts insist the programs are legal and that the whole thing is a left-wing plot.

But yeah, they’re totally the same.