Baffled with David DesRoches

Current statistics paint a bleak picture for American children: about one in four kids will experience some form of abuse or neglect at some point in their lifetimes. But, what if we could predict the likelihood of abuse before it happens? What about at birth? 
Social scientists and computer programmers are hoping to do just that. 
New predictive risk models that promise to be able to determine the likelihood of abuse or neglect are being deployed in public child protective service agencies around the country. However, poorly implemented algorithms have real-world impacts on real people.
When used in child welfare cases, algorithms consider things like interactions with police or the welfare system. However, many of these data are proxies for race or poverty. For example, people are more likely to call police on a Black family and give a white family the benefit of the doubt. That interaction with police then becomes data an algorithm considers when determining risk.
Again, the data are biased because it comes from biased people, and sometimes the data are even racist. A computer doesn’t know the difference between a racist complaint and a real one. They are both data, and in a computer’s eyes, equally as useful.
This episode is a production of the Department of Motion Pictures and Stories of Change, a partnership of the Sundance Institute and the Skoll Foundation, with support from IFP and Quinnipiac University. Our editor is John Dankosky. Our mixers are Ben Kruse and Henry Bellingham. Our producers are Elizabeth Lodge Stepp and Michael Gottwald. Executive Produced by Josh Penn. Research by Kate Osborn. Fact checking by Jacqueline Rabe Thomas. Additional reporting by Colleen Shaddox. Special Thanks to Emily Jampel.


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Covering abortion as journalist is a huge challenge, but we often create more problems by using language that inflames tension and deepens distrust. In this episode, we talk about four things that journalists can do to cover the abortion debate more fairly, and avoid the partisanship trap.
This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio.

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All information that emerges during wartime, no matter where it comes from, is tainted. It’s tainted because of the nature of war. War splits us. It unites one side against the other. It completely eliminates nuance. It over-simplifies everything. It consolidates everything into a neat little package: in this case, Russia versus the world. 
And frankly, while Russia is obviously the aggressor here, we should be concerned about how unbalanced the coverage of this war has been. Most journalists are taking a clear side, which might be the right thing to do from a moral perspective, but is it right from a journalism perspective?
So how can we – as journalists and as news consumers – make sense of it all? Is it even possible to know the truth about a war when virtually all information is coming with strings attached, and journalists themselves are aligning with one side?
Baffled with David DesRoches is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio. Our social media coordinator is Jillian Catalano and our video guy is Jake McCarthy. Follow David on Twitter @SavingEJ and follow the studio on Instagram and Twitter @QUPodcasts
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In this episode, host David DesRoches interviews the Baffled production team: Grace McGuire, Jillian Catalano, and Jake McCarthy. Grace is a second-year student are Quinnipiac University, majoring in Journalism with a double-minor in Spanish and Sociology. Jillian is also a second-year student; a Public Relations major minoring in management. Jake is a first-year journalism major and psychology minor.
This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast studio.
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It's not so much what American journalists write that threatens democracy. No, it’s more about what they don't write -- context. This lack of context is what perpetuates American propaganda. Journalists might not be waving American flags and talking about freedom and democracy openly, but they are certainly doing that subversively, by omitting the context and withholding the whole truth.
And when we don’t tell the whole truth, journalists end up as unwitting regime propagandists. Who suffers as a result? Everyone. Democracy also suffers because the people remain uninformed and unable to empathize with their foreign brothers and sisters. The missing context creates holes which are filled in with beliefs. And in that ignorance the public remains, ripe for manipulation by the partisan press and of course, demagogues.
That’s why American journalism’s hidden nationalism is the biggest threat to democracy – it oversimplifies and leaves the people ignorant. And ignorant people simply gravitate toward what they believe, which deepens polarization. And because most American journalism exists within a for-profit business structure, the journalism itself becomes more partisan, because that’s what brings in the views, the clicks, the bucks.
This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio. Our producer is Grace McGuire, our social media coordinator is Jillian Catalano, and our videographer is Jake McCarthy. The music was composed and performed by host David DesRoches.
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Host David DesRoches interviews Quinnipiac professor and journalism chair, Molly Yanity about the importance of journalism within democracy, what it means to defend a fragile democracy, and how to address the cross roads journalists are facing today.
The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio, hosted by David DesRoches, director of community programming and longtime journalist, and produced by Quinnipiac student Grace McGuire. Jillian Catalano is the social media coordinator and Jake McCarthy is the videographer.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daviddesroches.substack.com

Polls are a lot like news stories. They can tell us about what’s going on, they inform the public about a moment in time, and they also drive us crazy. Host David interviewed Associate Vice President of the Quinnipiac Poll, Doug Schwartz in 2019 to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of modern polling.
The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio, hosted by David DesRoches, director of community programming and longtime journalist, and produced by Quinnipiac student Grace McGuire. Jillian Catalano is the social media coordinator and Jake McCarthy is the videographer.
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Some countries, such as Portugal, require their journalists to be licensed and yet those countries rate higher on the Press Freedom Index than the United States. Is licensing journalists the way to regain the public's trust? Host David DesRoches talks with Indiana lawyer, Steve Key, who is the executive director and general counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association, about this concept.
The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio, hosted by David DesRoches, director of community programming and longtime journalist, and produced by Quinnipiac student Grace McGuire. Jillian Catalano is the social media coordinator and Jake McCarthy is the videographer.
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Host David Desroches interviews Quinnipiac University Assistant Teaching Professor Wasim Ahmad about the value of diversity in newsrooms, the different types of diversity that actually exist, and about photojournalism in the modern age and its ethics.
The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio, hosted by David DesRoches, director of community programming and longtime journalist, and produced by Quinnipiac student Grace McGuire. Jillian Catalano is the social media coordinator and Jake McCarthy is the videographer.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daviddesroches.substack.com

This episode looks into a story in which a journalist discovered that a Missouri state website had included the social security numbers of tens of thousands of public school teachers in the HTML code. The governor had responded by calling him a hacker. The episode looks at how this specific story is more complicated than it might seem, and how this story is a classic example of the never ending narrative battle.

The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio, hosted by David DesRoches, director of community programming and longtime journalist, and produced by Quinnipiac student Grace McGuire. Jillian Catalano is the social media coordinator and Jake McCarthy is the videographer.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daviddesroches.substack.com