If the PBS television special, “Deadlock: An Election Story” really wanted to have a conversation about how politically polarized Americans can find common ground, it should have had more political diversity on its panel.
“The current climate of American discourse finds us deeply entrenched and overconfident in our own beliefs,” said moderator Aaron Tang, a left-leaning law professor at the University of California-Davis said in a statement promoting the show. “Deadlock aims to illuminate how, for many of the difficult challenges facing our nation, the honest answers are nuanced and complex. Our goal is to spark open-mindedness and help people find the middle ground instead of retreating to our usual corners.”
But the show retreated the usual corners for two reasons: the premise of the discussion had a left-leaning tone, and the discussion featured mostly Democrats or left-leaning panelists, including:
Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist; Adrian Fontes, the Democrat Arizona secretary of state; left-leaning Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell professor of African American studies at Princeton University; left-leaning Astead Herndon, a national politics reporter at The New York Times; Democrat Jeh C. Johnson, former secretary of Homeland Security and former general counsel to the Department of Defense; Elise Jordan, of NBC/MSNBC, an anti-Trump political analyst; Katie Harbath, a Republican who has said she never voted for Trump and a former Facebook executive who supported the decision to ban Trump from the platform; Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today and well-known author of
