On the episode of the en(gender)ed podcast, our guest is Jenna Spinelle, one of the hosts of the Democracy Works Podcast, produced by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University.  Democracy Works is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. 

We speak to Jenna today about how the media and democracy have been impacted by COVID-19, why it’s important to support a free press now more than ever, and what Democracy Works Podcast and the network is doing to help spread credible information and get to the root of the infodemic.

During our conversation, Jenna and I referenced the following resources and topics:

• The importance of the census and primaries to a free and fair election process
• The Democracy Works podcast episode on the Census and COVID-19
• The use of Census data for reapportionment, redistricting, and gerrymandering
• The controversy behind whether or not to add a “citizenship question” on the Census
• Civic Power by Sabeel Rahman and its exploration of whether we have had a successful multi-ethnic democracy
• What are the structural, institutional components of a democracy?
• Voting by mail and its history in the military
• The Democracy Works podcast interview with Charles Stewart of MIT
• The myth of voter fraud
• What “epistemic polarization” is and how it is impacting our democratic institutions
• The Democracy Works podcast interview with Frances Lee about polarization in Congress
• The Flipside newsletter and the AllSides website-two resources to present the left and right on a particular news item
• Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View From Somewhere:  Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity
• The role of social media platforms in ensuring journalistic integrity, such as the Facebook Journalism Project

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