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Episode #85: Anna Flagg
177 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to this week’s episode of The PolicyViz Podcast. I’m pleased to welcome Anna Flagg from the Marshall Project this week. Anna and I met at the Malofiej Infographic World Summit in March. With 899 online entries to judge,...
The post Episode #85: Anna Flagg appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabich. Now, on this week's episode of the show, we get to talk to a new very good friend of mine, Anna Flagg from the Marshall Project. Anna, how are you? I'm great. How are you? I'm great. Good to see you again.
Malofie Conference Fun
00:00:29
Speaker
We spent an intense week at Malofie in Spain a few weeks ago, or Malofiej.
00:00:36
Speaker
or Malofie. Malofie. Malofie. Malofie. No one knows how to actually pronounce it. It's the mystery of the conference. Yeah, I mean, it's fun because everybody can pronounce it their own way and nobody's right. That's right. That's right. You just do basically whatever you want. It's Europe. You're allowed to basically do whatever you want. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. So we had a pretty fun intense week judging 899 online entries for the conference.
00:01:05
Speaker
I think they could have thrown one more in there. But anyway, we're going to talk not about Malofia this this week. We're going to talk about your work at the Marshall Project and then follow up on the talk that you gave at Malofia with some other dive in a little bit onto alternative facts and some other other stuff that you're talking about.
Mission of the Marshall Project
00:01:30
Speaker
But before we do that, can you maybe introduce yourself for folks who may not be familiar with you or your work?
00:01:35
Speaker
Yep. My name is Anna Flagg and I'm a data journalist.
00:01:40
Speaker
I studied math and computer science in school. And then when I was graduating, I was trying to figure out where I'm going to apply that. And the field of data journalism was becoming more and more interesting and important at that time. And I got really interested in journalism in general. And I decided I wanted to be a journalist. So I switched over and been applying math.
00:02:09
Speaker
and data methods in journalistic projects since then. And I freelanced for a while. I worked a little bit for Open Secrets from the Center for Sansa Politics. And I also worked at Al Jazeera for a little while and freelanced a few other places. I did a project with ProPublica. And now I'm at the Marshall Project, which is a news organization in New York that covers criminal justice.
00:02:35
Speaker
So you are sort of the modern journalist, right? Like you have the journalism that sort of traditional journalism chops, but also bring in the coding skills and the data skills.
00:02:45
Speaker
I mean, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I would say that my formal journalism background is not well, not so formal, I guess, because, you know, I didn't go to J school. But actually, you know, as as I've been getting more and more into the field and meeting more people in the field, I'm finding that it actually is kind of less common than at least than I suppose for journalists to necessarily have attended J school. It's just I think the field is diversifying a little bit. And I think that that I think that's good. I think it's
00:03:14
Speaker
Well, obviously vital to have people who have the strong formal foundational kind of journalism skills. But when you combine those sorts of people with people from outside who have different skills, and I don't know, you just end up making these projects that are really different and really interesting. Right. Right. I mean, it's the combination of the data and then the traditional journalism, I think that gives a rich presentation to people.
00:03:40
Speaker
I want to talk about some of the work at Marshall Project, but could you talk a little bit about the Marshall Project? How many people are there and what the mission is of the project? Because I'm not sure everybody is familiar with the mission of what you guys are trying to do over there. Yeah. So we're a fairly young organization. And the mission of it is to cover criminal justice. And criminal justice in the United States, as I'm sure you know and I'm sure a lot of people know, is a very misunderstood or
00:04:08
Speaker
and kind of opaque system. It's a massive system. It involves so many people. There are 2.3 million people incarcerated. It's just the system that operates in a very opaque way that people don't understand and people don't know about. And there are so many things that happen that just, you know, there's no reporting about, you know? So the mission of the Marshall Project is to kind of try to shed light on this massive, opaque system that affects so many Americans. Yeah.
00:04:35
Speaker
I always found it amazing that we don't have great statistics on who's in prison and jails, considering that you would just have to walk down the hallway and count people because they're locked in the cells.
Pay to Stay Program Story
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, yes, I mean, I think that's probably a tougher task then yeah, it's probably There's one story that came out recently that I want to talk about and then we can dive into some of the other Topics that you that I know you're interested in Recently or Marshall project put out this pay to stay story and you actually had a really nice post on the methodology Behind the story. Can you talk about the story and then and then about that methodology?
00:05:14
Speaker
Sure. So the Pay to Stay story is a story written by myself, but led actually by Alicia Santo, a reporter at the Marshall Project. So this is kind of her story. So her and a reporter named Victoria Kim from the LA Times, because this is a collaboration between us and the LA Times.
00:05:33
Speaker
did a story about this little known program in California, in Southern California, which we call Pay to Stay, which is this kind of option for people who have been convicted of certain crimes who are going to go to county jail to instead pay a certain sum of money to spend their
00:05:51
Speaker
time in a city jail instead and the reason you would want to do that is well I mean obviously there are a lot of reasons to try to avoid the LA County jail for instance it's a you know notorious scary dangerous place and a city jail experience can be just a much easier and safer option so
00:06:10
Speaker
If you are able to afford it, a judge may or may not allow you to kind of buy an upgrade to a city jail to spend your time there, depending on the crime that you have committed. So it's an upgrade to a nicer suite.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yes, yes. I would definitely not refer to it as this week. It still is jail. It's still definitely jail. And actually, I mean, that's kind of one interesting part that I found, at least of the story, because there had been some coverage of it locally. And the angle of those stories usually was like, oh, look at this luxurious hotel experience for rich people or whatever.
00:06:48
Speaker
Um, which I think, so what we did in this, uh, process was collect data on all the pay to stay programs that we were able to find and kind of, you know, figure out, okay, who actually is making use of these programs? How many people, what crimes do they have? What options do they have at the different jails? And really what we found was it's not so much as like a luxurious experience.
00:07:11
Speaker
pretty much people are paying because of safety. And that really kind of begs the question not so much as like, oh, you know, why is someone getting this luxurious experience? I think it's more like, why is it that when you get sentenced to go to prison, like you're also buying not just your lack of liberty, but like your safety? Yeah, your safety is at risk. Yeah.
00:07:33
Speaker
Right, right. I mean, it goes to what is the definition of punishment, right? We're taking away someone's liberty, but that means we also need to take away their dignity and their safety. I mean, that's not really at least my understanding of what punishment is. Right. So can you talk a little bit about the data? How was it stored and how did you go in with the times and collect it?
00:07:54
Speaker
Well, it was a very long and, well, boring process, so I guess I won't get into too much detail about it. But basically, we just had to contact every single program, and we asked them for records for a certain time period, and we asked for certain things. We were specifically interested in what were the convictions of people serving.
00:08:14
Speaker
How long did they stay and how much did they spend? Yeah, it was just kind of numerous back and forth with the city jails from each one of the programs and then kind of a long process of trying to clean all that data and make it kind of comparable to each other. So in addition to the full story, you also then wrote a separate piece that was the guide to the methodology.
00:08:40
Speaker
So how important is that for the Marshall project? How important is it for you to have these sorts of things where you are showing the reader how you work with some data, collected the data, and then the sort of behind the scenes work on the methodology?
Transparency and Journalism
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think it actually is really important and more important than I even realized before we started it because it kind of goes down to this question of transparency in your reporting process. So I'm telling you exactly what I did and how I did it and that way you know
00:09:13
Speaker
you know what i did you can check up on everything you can contact me and ask me questions about things that i you know you think maybe i did wrong or i should have done this as many people have done and i think it's a pretty crucial part of the the reporting process to like share not just what you found but how you found it
00:09:31
Speaker
So other people can follow along with what you did and then also other people can, you know, they can do it too. Like somebody else could kind of take this process and run it in a different area or, you know, they can contact me and I can, you know, try to do something that they suggest, you know, I think it's important.
00:09:48
Speaker
So it's interesting because in the research fields and academia, there's the peer review process where you write a paper and you have people review it before it gets published. And presumably your team and other news organizations have a similar sort of internal discussion that you have about the methodology.
00:10:06
Speaker
And then you put it out. Do you sort of view these methodology posts that a lot of people are doing? I know 538 has a GitHub page and other places doing something similar. But do you view it as, in some ways, as a peer review? As opening things up, not necessarily peer being your peers of news agencies, but peer review just being the broader readership of people being able to
00:10:30
Speaker
dive in and check in and ask you questions. And as you said, maybe extend the methodology to a similar sort of project. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good way of putting it. This is an opportunity for everybody to really examine what we did and for us to be really transparent about that. And I think that's pretty important when you're asking people to trust the information that you're giving them.
00:10:52
Speaker
Okay great, so really interesting work at the Marshall Project and of course I'll link to it on the show page so people can go to the site and check it out.
Malofiej Conference Reflections
00:10:59
Speaker
I want to pivot a bit to talk about the talk you gave at Malofiej or Malofiej or however we're going to pronounce it.
00:11:08
Speaker
You gave, I would say, a fairly uplifting talk, I think, for a lot of the journalists in the room because... Oh, good. Well, why don't I have you... I'm not going to give the summary. Why don't you give the summary of the talk? Because I think a lot of people responded very positively about thinking
00:11:25
Speaker
in the new wave of the world where things are going that the media has not only responsibility, but maybe is doing its job in a positive way. So let me ask you if you could just sort of summarize that talk and then we can dive in a little bit.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, so this talk was kind of inspired by, well, just the experience of kind of my newsroom and reporters in my newsroom and myself and how we felt right after the November election. So right after Trump won the election, journalism kind of came under fire quite a bit.
Post-Election Journalism Challenges
00:11:58
Speaker
So and that was partly because there were all these predictive models that were giving people the impression that he was definitely not going to win. But another reason was just because, I mean, leading up to the election, there was so much false information that was just out there. And it really felt like a lot of people were very discouraged because it felt like, you know, even though, OK, I have proved that this information is false, but nobody believes me or no one's reading what I'm saying or nobody cares.
00:12:27
Speaker
And I think, specifically, data journalists had to deal with that problem, maybe even more so just because everyone kind of equates data journalism with this predictive modeling. And as we know, data journalism is a lot bigger than that, but the problem was still there. There were just so many people making comments like, okay, this shows that data journalism is dead. Everyone should stop being data journalists. It's a fraud, it's a completely,
00:12:54
Speaker
that this field is over. And so, you know, like, obviously, as somebody in that field, I was pretty discouraged by that. And I didn't really think that it was true also. So this talk was kind of supposed to be like a little bit of a response to that and kind of like a like a pep talk, I guess. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think a lot of people viewed it as that. So what do we do in a world, some people are calling it like the post fact or the post truth world? What what do we do in a world like like that?
00:13:24
Speaker
Well, the first thing I think is to not necessarily believe that we're in a post fact world. Like I do not, I do not live in a post fact world. And I don't think that the rest of us do either. And it's mostly if somebody is really trying to convince you that this is that facts don't matter anymore, you should think about you know, what that person's agenda might be. Because I mean, I think it's a pretty well documented, like kind of
00:13:48
Speaker
historical propaganda technique to just like, you know, tell everybody, oh, you know, the whole media is lying. No facts matter. So you can't believe anything that that way you can. That's a great way to kind of argue against any piece of journalism. So so to me, that argument is just very suspect. And I don't want to kind of. Yeah.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I hope to live my life in the world of facts. You had mentioned the election forecasts and predictive models that all basically failed. Does that shake people's confidence in journalism? And I would say I'd also broaden it to science more generally, like we're just off the weekend of the March on Science.
00:14:32
Speaker
Do these sorts of, let's call them big failures? I mean, I don't think everyone would call them a big failure, but the models were clearly wrong and whether that's based on the model or the polling or whatever. But do those sorts of things shake the broader audience's confidence in news reporting, in facts, in science?
00:14:53
Speaker
I think it does shake people's confidence, but maybe for not exactly the right reason, I think. So one thing is that we can argue back and forth about whether the predictive models were right or wrong. I mean, different people make different arguments about like, I mean, it's a prediction, so can a prediction even be wrong, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. We don't need to get too much into that. To me, the greater failure in terms of all this kind of
00:15:19
Speaker
election coverage was more the like massive focus on kind of horse race style coverage like leading up to the election because there's so many important things that people need to know and it's more important for them to know when they're trying to make their decision about who to vote for the most crucial thing is not for me to like you know try to know like every single county and like
00:15:41
Speaker
Who's gonna vote for Hillary who's gonna vote for Trump and like with what certainty and blah all this kind of stuff, right? That's not the most crucial thing for me to know to make my decision I need to make my decision based on like real issues, you know, like what what are the candidates stances on different things? What are they gonna do? What what am I actually voting for and that is what the coverage should have been and there was just such a huge kind of mismatch in terms of like what
00:16:05
Speaker
what the coverage was and what it should have been, like regardless of whether the predictions were right or wrong. And I think, you know, another big problem with predictions in this way, anyway, is that they kind of can affect the thing that they're trying to predict. Like, if all these models are telling me, you know what, Hillary Clinton is 100% going to win, do I even bother to go vote at that point? If I think, you know, it's kind of like an observer effect, like looking at the thing changes the thing.
00:16:35
Speaker
And that's something that I don't think that, you know, was considered too much just because the sort of like predictive coverage seems to do really well. I mean, it's in terms of clicks, I guess, or I don't know if that's the reason. Yeah, but that's a really good point. If you if there's a 99% chance your candidate is going to win, do you really think that you need to go vote?
00:16:55
Speaker
But let me also ask whether you think people change their minds. So we know people are sort of rooted in their political party. Once you're a Democrat, you're most likely going to be a Democrat, Republican, you're going to be a Republican. So can data, can facts change people's minds? I mean, I know what you're going to say.
00:17:18
Speaker
But I do wonder whether this sort of polarization politically has spread to be polarization sort of everything now and whether the media even with data and with models can help to change people's minds.
Impact of Journalism and Data
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, I absolutely think it can. I mean, I know I've definitely changed my mind about things. I've like been like, Oh, you know what, I was wrong about this thing. And then I changed my mind. And that's, that's okay. This is one of the things that I kind of trying to talk about in in that talk as well as kind of the way that you present information to people in a way that
00:17:52
Speaker
Kind of helps them just think about the substance of what you're saying rather than getting you know getting distracted by like being angry that maybe they're wrong about something or something because I mean I think it's definitely true that we are very biased in terms of Wanting to hear news that validates the views that we already have like that's that's definitely true
00:18:13
Speaker
And that's why I try to be very suspect about things. Whenever I read something that backs up something that I already think and I feel smart for a second, I'm like, oh, wow, yeah, I already knew that, obviously. I try to be very suspect of that kind of feeling of smugness. And I try to think, OK, why does that just make me feel so good? What is that? So that's something. We need to all be very suspect of our own beliefs and emotions.
00:18:42
Speaker
But another thing is that if you're telling someone a new piece of information that contradicts what you think that they already think, you need to present it to them in a respectful way and in a way that doesn't judge them as a person just for having a different belief than you. It should focus just on the information itself so that if, in fact, it does turn out that your piece of information is correct and their prior belief is wrong, it's not that huge of a thing for them to change their mind. It doesn't feel like an attack and it doesn't feel
00:19:11
Speaker
you know, like something that's so hard to do, you know what I mean? And I think studies have shown that if you present your information in a very kind of angry tone and then you say something that your reader disagrees with, your reader will disregard what you said because of your tone already.
00:19:26
Speaker
So you have a lot better shot if you just approach it in like a calm and respectful way. And I think that that is something that we as journalists can work on a little bit. And do you think that some news organizations, because there's a lot of mixing now between sort of blogs and opinion with the news coverage, whether even though they sort of get their own parts of the site, the content is at least, at least my perception is,
00:19:55
Speaker
When I go to website A, I'm not going to name anybody, right? But if I go to website A and there's the opinion side and then the news side, they're all sort of hung together. They're all under the same banner. Do you think that that mixing may be responsible for some of these perceptions of news media that these groups are liberal, these groups are conservative, these groups are whatever, because there seems to be more of the mixing of these different types of platforms and writing? Or has it always just been that way and it's just a little more, you know, now it's just online?
00:20:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I don't know. I think that, I mean, definitely places that really mix their opinion into their regular coverage end up having a stronger kind of
00:20:37
Speaker
you know, branded identity that people associate with them. So people will view anything that they say in that light. So, you know, I think what you're saying is it matters how much you separate your editorial content from the rest of it. But yeah, I don't know whether this is something that has just kind of always been an issue. Right, right.
00:20:58
Speaker
So you sound like you're optimistic for how people are covering the news. When it comes to the Marshall Project, when it comes to justice policy, are you optimistic that positive change in policy will be forthcoming over the next few years? Or do you think that justice policy is really just not making positive headway, making positive change for people?
00:21:27
Speaker
So I'm definitely optimistic. One, I think, good thing that is going to come out of this election is that it really did cause a lot of journalists to do a lot of kind of self-reflection. I mean, I certainly did. And I'm sure that, like, everyone did.
00:21:42
Speaker
And that can only be a good thing. I was listening to, I think it was on WNYC, somebody was talking about how, I don't know, the very adversarial attitude that Trump has taken towards the media might be kind of a good thing in certain ways because
00:22:01
Speaker
there's no longer going to be so much of this very like insider reporting, right? Like he's not going to have a very cozy relationship with all these journalists who like have a great relationship with him. And that's kind of colors how they cover him. And I mean, there's this really great quote by Glenn Thrush, I think that talks about the White House press corps. And he says it's like covering the horse race from inside of the horse.
00:22:22
Speaker
or something like that, which I just think is like such a great way of putting it. But definitely I would say like, so we're not in the horse anymore, right? So that might be a good thing. So that's, that's good. And then with regards to just criminal justice. Yeah, I'm definitely optimistic about that. Just like even because like,
00:22:43
Speaker
Well, there's just so much that needs to be done. So to me, it seems very unlikely that we're not going to make any progress. And we already have. The work that some of the reporters have done has been just really fantastic. And it's very inspiring to me to watch them do a story and then see a policy change announcement the next day or something like that. You know, that's happened a few times and it's very inspiring to watch.
00:23:10
Speaker
That's great. Well, on that optimistic uplifting note, I'm going to thank you for coming on the show. As always, great to talk to you. Yeah, thank you for having me. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have comments or questions, please do let me know on Twitter, on the show notes, and please do rate and review the show on iTunes so others can learn about it. So thanks for tuning in this week. This has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.