Michael Cummins
The longest running TV show in history, Meet the Press, taped part of its March 25 episode at the Memorial Union.
Meet The Press first visited Madison in 2014, during the final stretch of the gubernatorial campaign. Back then, the show’s producers asked Reach Out Wisconsin, an organization I volunteer for, to put together a small, politically diverse group to discuss polarization in the wake of the Act 10 upheaval.
On March 21, when the show returned to town, I asked host Chuck Todd what brought him back. “In 2014, the whole idea about polarization was a quaint issue,” he said. Though it happened eons ago, politically, that Madison discussion has stuck with him. When, recently, he and his staff started planning a citizen roundtable on guns, “the first thing [we] thought of was, ‘Remember that group in Wisconsin?’ And here we are.”
As the NBC staff and crew — 12 of them in all — finish preparing Tripp Commons at the Memorial Union, I sense some nervous energy among the discussion participants, a mix of liberals, conservatives and independents. The guests are Kaleem Caire, founder of One City Early Learning Center; Scott Grabins, chair of the Republican Party of Dane County; UW-Madison law student Noelle Long; Hans Noeldner, an energy and environmental activist; attorney Betsy Erickson; software developer Davi Post; and Patricia Zanton, who works at CapTel, a company that makes captioned phones for the hearing impaired.
A wooden table is plopped in the center of the cavernous room. The table and surrounding area are lit up like an operating theater, with three camera rigs dotting the perimeter. This feels like the big time.
For Zanton, who supports the Second Amendment but favors some restrictions and limitations, the nervous energy persists. “I was excited all day, but the moment the cameras started rolling, my heart started pounding,” Zanton tells me later. “I thought that that would go away in a few minutes.” It did not.
Zanton and the others hide whatever anxiety they brought to the set. Their 30 minute-plus conversation is informed, thoughtful and scrupulously civil. Everyone, right or left, listens intently to everyone else.
As moderator, Todd keeps the focus on the participants. He has, evidently, committed their names to memory before sitting down. He opens with a question: “Does America have a gun problem? Does anyone disagree with that?” No one pushes back.
Early on, Todd asks someone to make the case for why people should be allowed to own an AR-15 rifle. Grabins gives it a shot: “Mechanically, it’s no different than a hunting rifle. Pull the trigger, you get one bullet. We tend to lump in too many things under that heading as an assault weapon. It’s just a semi-automatic rifle.”
Erickson disagrees. “Hunting rifles are designed differently — they’re designed to shoot bullets at higher velocity over a farther distance… with the goal to kill an animal,” she says. “An AR-15 is designed to kill people. It’s designed to inflict maximum damage at a much closer range and to fire bullets in rapid succession.”
Toward the end of the discussion, one of the crew members spots a problem with the light above the table. He apologetically stops the proceedings to attend to it. Immediately, other crew members swarm the guests, adjusting clip-on microphones and makeup. It seems like these issues have been bugging them, from the sidelines, for a while.
Zanton tells me that Caire made one of the best points of the discussion. “He mentioned that there are far more black kids murdered in any year, but that such stories don’t really get the same attention and no one is really focusing on how to stop those shootings.”
The conversation is distilled down to about six minutes on the Sunday broadcast. The final clip of the segment shows Todd thanking the participants. “I always like being here because there’s something about the citizenry of Wisconsin that makes you guys not want to yell at each other. So I really appreciate that.”
First episode of the TV version of Meet the Press: Nov. 6, 1947
First host and co-producer: Martha Roundtree
Number of female hosts since Roundtree stepped down in 1953: 0
First guest on TV show: James Farley, former postmaster general and DNC chair
First athlete on the show: Jackie Robinson in 1957
First sitting president to appear on the show: Gerald Ford
Guest for show’s 50th anniversary episode on Nov. 9, 1997: President Bill Clinton