The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Professor Peter Loge, who heads the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, makes clear that we don’t reason by facts, even though we often THINK we do.

In honor of our One Year Anniversary, we’re revisiting our archives and sharing some clips from our early episodes last year. Here, Professor Howard Schneider, founder of the Center for News Literacy, shares his thoughts about how journalists should avoid bias in the media.

Gabe Fleisher shared that he’s always thinking about what he can write or what details he can add to make the readers really understand what’s going on and make them feel like they know what happened at momentous events and momentous places. You’re trying to represent things for people in a way that makes barriers fall away and makes them feel like they’re right there too, because he’s at places w...

Gabe talked about his excitement to bring original reporting to the newsletter now that he’s at college in DC rather than St Louis. In his few weeks in DC, he’s interviewed Senators in the Capitol, covered the vigil on the steps of the Supreme Court on the night RBG died, was one of just six reporters reporting on Bernie Sanders’ first press event since ending his campaign, and covered Nancy Pelos...

Gave Fleisher notes that he thinks How hard you are willing to work, or how much you are willing to learn, are much greater determinants. His age DOES provide a different perspective in his writing. He’s deeply committed to making politics as accessible as possible, and often adults aren’t as focused on this —a lot of politics can be complex and dense and not that easy to follow. As a young person...

Gabe Fleisher talked to us about the challenges of figuring out what to cover and what NOT to cover in his daily newsletter. He tries to stay focused on several specific areas—The White House, Congress, The Courts, and Elections—and DOESN’T cover things like foreign affairs or state level politics. Then there are things like coronavirus that in some ways fits into all those categories and in other...

Gabe Fleisher recognizes that criticism is inevitable. Some people think that’s sad but Gabe thinks journalists should ALWAYS be open to to receiving critical feedback. He notes that he loves hearing from readers—and doesn’t let it dictate his writing. You can’t control how people are going to respond to your journalism so it’s wisest for a writer to focus on what one sees to be the truth. Gabe em...

We were so fortunate to speak with Gabe Fleisher, the 18 year old founder of the Wake Up To Politics daily newsletter, this week. Gabe talked about how all encompassing the impact of politics is, for young people even more than older ones, given that politics affects the air we breathe, the water we drink, the schools we go to. Everything is a political decision. WE are able to influence those pol...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, Olivia, and our new correspondent from Real Talk , Eliza Goler, spoke with Gabe Fleisher, the 18 year old founder of the Wake Up to Politics newsletter. Every morning, 50,000 readers wake up to Gabe’s newsletter, which he started as an email to his mom when he was 10.  Gabe has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Pos...

Pat Joseph underscored that the Census is the civil rights fight of our lifetime. We don’t have freedom of privacy. Journalists are potentially being restricted in acting in the American Way that we know—to be informers. When he sees people being exiled or imprisoned for revealing heinous things the government has done, and the climb towards totalitarianism with our current president, he sees the...

Pat Joseph emphasized that getting community groups involved was key to marketing the Census in a way that never could have happened at the city level. They represented a lot of those historically underrepresented community groups and reached out to them in a more personal way. The winning forum was multiple languages, leveraging grants team, and casting—actively looking for representatives from t...

Olivia noted that she wouldn’t necessarily associate Pat Joseph—as a young man of color—with the Census, bc the Census conjures images of an old white man with a pencil for her. She asked him how he and his team worked to “rebrand” the Census. Pat noted that part of it is that the Census office is the most diverse he’s ever worked in, which led to the generation of lots of fresh ideas, since peopl...

Pat Joseph approaches things from a humanist standpoint, noting that he doesn’t think he’s any different than someone who emigrated here, like his parents did, particularly given that most people in the U.S. originally came from somewhere else if you go back far enough. He underscores that the benefit of counting immigrants—and fully including them in all ways—is to society at large. The higher th...

Pat Joseph notes that he didn’t have a lot at stake in the 2016 election btw Trump and Clinton, because he felt that both candidates were going to do things that he would find absolutely appalling when they came to power. Neither one of them was interested in ending the industrial war complex, or peace in the Middle East, or legalizing marijuana, or making college free, or providing universal heal...

Pat Joseph describes how he and his team treated getting people to fill out the Census like a multi-faceted social justice campaign. One of his colleagues referred to the Census as “the great civil rights battle of our time.” Because when you think about the communities that aren’t counted, it’s pretty predictably black and brown. Who are the people who don’t fill out the Census? It’s immigrants,...

Pat Joseph notes that when people think of the census, they think about being counted—of someone knocking on the door and asking how many people are in your home. Some people, erroneously, think of it as being about citizenship, which it’s not—ALL people are meant to be counted. But it also serves a much larger purpose. The Census determines our representation in Congress, through the apportionmen...

Much though Pat loved his work for the Manhattan Borough President, he saw there was quite a lot of harm being done around him. His big learn was there was that it isn’t just a classroom or school based issue causing inequities; there are quite a lot of problematic behaviors and policy making in the political arena causing inequity in schools. He didn’t feel elected officials were necessarily doin...

Pat Joseph comes at things from an educational perspective. He taught HS special ed for 4 years and experienced educational inequity first hand, teaching in predominantly white schools on the Upper West Side and in schools serving predominantly students of color in the South Bronx —resource disparities, treatment of students, presence of police. He saw education policy as a route to correct some o...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, and Olivia spoke with Patrick Joseph,  PhD student at Teachers College and Graduate Research Assistant for the Center for Educational Equity, where he works on civic diversity.  Patrick’s commitment to educational and political transformation has played out through his work as a classroom teacher, as the Senior Education Policy Advisor...

Podcaster Madeline shared her concerns about social media being a wormhole that she doesn’t want to get sucked into. Simultaneously, she feels a need to stay updated about what’s going on amongst GenZers, so she forces herself to go on a bit. She also gets “ambient news” from her mom listening to WNYC in the background, as well as notifications from her school’s subscription to the NYTimes. Overal...

Olivia asked about whether one group or party would be more negatively affected than others by media policy decisions. Robyn noted that the implications are much more equal than people tend to think. If you look at the top media that’s shared on FB, it always tends to be conservative. Robyn and colleagues studied demonetization across a range of genres and found it happening at every single level...

Media analyst Robyn Caplan talked about how politicians are engaging in debate as to whether platforms will follow rules and norms of the US or elsewhere, given that they operate globally. There’s concerns about whether this could lead to tech companies playing to the lowest common denominators rather than American values—for ex, Europe has more of an investment in freedom FROM speech than we do a...

Robyn Caplan notes that she has every belief that Facebook will change its political ad policy before the election. She agreed that it could definitely backfire. There are Concerns that essential voter information won’t be able to get out in a timely fashion, and that grassroots false information could dominate the platforms w/o campaigns being able to contradict misinformation. The intention is t...

Robyn Caplan discussed the distinction btw mediation and moderation as strategies used by platforms to increase trustworthiness of information online. Users tend to engage in moderation but a lot of platforms use a system of mediation to determine what is a trustworthy source and to then highlight that and bring it to the top. She noted that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—both need to...

Robyn Caplan underscored the importance of policies that prioritize a protected class. She explained the distinction between freedom from speech and freedom of speech. In the U.S., they are collapsed and freedom TO speak is prioritized over freedom from speech.