Matt Rothschild: twice as likely to speak to a man

We tried to keep this edition under wraps (due to FAIR leakage in the past) and were careful who we spoke to about it ahead of time. One friend we spoke to, who spoke at The Progressive self-congratulating celebration this spring, insisted that The Progressive Radio Show, hosted by the magazine's CEO and publisher Matthew Rothschild, was doing a great job on gender equality.





"I know you don't care for Matthew," we were told, "but he really is, at least on the radio show, striving towards equality."





Equality ain't horseshoes.





You either get it or you don't.





And, no, we don't care for Matthew Rothschild. He was a raving lunatic during the Democratic Party primaries -- primaires he had no business in because, as he would finally publicly reveal this year (we told you in 2008) he was a Socialist -- insisting that one day's photo in The New York Times demonstrated an anti-Barack bias of the paper, linking to the right-wing Weekly Standard (linking to the right-wing Weekly Standard!!!!) as a "recommended link" just to highlight (and giggle over) Hillary being called the c-word.





We don't care for Matthew Rothschild. We're far from alone. And his late 2009 stepping out of the political closet did him tremendous damage because it's the sort of revelation that needs to be made when you're endorsing a political candidate and trashing another. If you've got your nose stuck in the Democratic Party's primary, people have every right to assume you're a Democrat and finding out that you've lied to them never goes over well.





We grasp that the coming out process can be a difficult one -- especially for cowards. But we also grasp that we no longer trust Matthew Rothschild and nothing short of an apology for his sexist actions in 2009 will have us forgiving him.





That said, we were happy to note The Progessive Radio Show did an outstanding job booking female guests. Why wouldn't we be happy to do that? It would make us look big (because it's known that, community wide, we all loathe Matty) and show that we weren't playing favorites.





But to applaud Matthew, we needed for him to do the work.





Despite the claims that he had, the reality was he hadn't.





We reviewed the 26 most recent show (from the Bill V. Mullen show all the way to to the Julie Bolz show) and what did we find?





For those who don't listen, The Progressive Radio Show is a weekly broadcast where Rothschild speaks to one guest for the entire program. So there were twenty-six guests in the most recent twenty-six shows.





Gender parity would be thirteen male guests and thirteen female ones.





That's not what they offered.





The 'Progressive' Radio Show offered seventeen male guests and nine female ones.





Nine times two is? 18. One short of 18. So basically, Matthew Rothschild booked twice as many men as he did women.





Now for the so-called 'progressive' media, that's something. Seriously, Matthew could puff out his chest with pride if he wanted to judge himself against his peers.





But is being only "a little racist" something to brag about? We don't think so. Nor do we think being "not as sexist as my peers" is anything to take pride in.