No labor officials on Sunday shows this weekend?

By Greg Sargent

I tend not to get into the business of questioning the guest choices made by the Sunday shows. But if there were ever a time the networks would want to book labor officials to appear, you'd think it would be now. The Wisconsin standoff is the most important domestic political story in the country right now, and as many commentators at those same networks have pointed out, both sides view this battle as ground zero in a national war that may determine the fate of organized labor in America.

But labor officials are beginning to fear that none of them will be invited on this weekend to give voice to the labor point of view. This, even as tough-talking anti-union governor Chris Christie is set to do a major appearance on CBS on Sunday.

One AFL-CIO official tells me that reps for the AFL-CIO and other unions reached out to all the big three network shows -- ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, and CBS' Face the Nation -- to ask if they would invite on any labor officials. Thus far the answer has been cool to indifferent, the official says.

No labor officials have yet been booked to appear. Carin Pratt, the executive producer of CBS's Face the Nation -- which is hosing Christie -- seemed to suggest as much in an email. "We are doing Gov. Christie for part of the show, with probably a segment on Libya," she said. "We're not only talking about labor."

Officials at NBC and ABC both told me their lineups were not yet complete, and wouldn't say any labor officials had been booked, though that could conceivably change.

Like I noted above, I tend not to see any point in questioning the Sunday lineups. But this moment somehow feels a bit different. There's a massive media lovefest underway over Christie, one that's hailing his role as the scourge of public employees everywhere. Not only is he appearing on Face the Nation, but a huge, 6600-word profile of Christie is set to appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine describing him as a "Republican superstar" who has found in public employees his very own "welfare queens."

But the big story right now is that public employees are proving not to be the easy scapegoat many conservative and neutral commentators expected them to be. While labor may well lose in Wisconsin, the important political story of the moment is that organized labor has surpised the political establishment with its show of force and its ability to mobilize, and could conceivably still win this standoff in a state where Republicans control the governorship and legislature. And the public is supporting the basic rights of public employees, not cheering on their foes.

It's very hard to generalize about such matters, but in this context, the basic priorities of the political media seem a bit off. At a minimum you'd think the intense public interest in Wisconsin would alone be enough to get the networks to invite labor officials on to talk about it.

UPDATE: Meet the Press has now agreed to host AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka.

