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Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Arielle Duhaime-Ross is the host of Reset, a podcast that re-evaluates the role of technology in our lives, from Stitcher and Vox Media.

How to listen to Arielle's episode

Listen to Arielle's episode and subscribe to Media Tribe on these links:

‎Media Tribe: Arielle Duhaime-Ross | Science, Hookworm and Polar Bears on Apple Podcasts
Arielle Duhaime-Ross is the host of Reset, a podcast that re-evaluates the role of technology in our lives, from Stitcher and Vox Media.
Listen to Arielle Duhaime-Ross on Apple Podcasts
Media Tribe - Arielle Duhaime-Ross | Science, Hookworm and Polar Bears
Arielle Duhaime-Ross is the host of Reset, a podcast that re-evaluates the role of technology in our lives, from Stitcher and Vox Media.
Listen to Arielle Duhaime-Ross on Google Podcasts
Listen to Arielle Duhaime-Ross on Spotify

Shaunagh talks to Arielle Duhaime-Ross

In this episode, Shaunagh speaks to Arielle Duhaime-Ross, the host of Reset, a podcast that re-evaluates the role of technology in our lives, from Stitcher and the Vox Media.

Arielle talks about being the first climate correspondent on American TV, her near close shave with a polar bear in Greenland and her experience of being targeted with death and rape threats by internet trolls. She also delves into her important investigation about hookworms in Alabama.

For those that don't know Arielle

Arielle is a Canadian journalist, passionate about a breadth of topics from science and the environment to health and LGBTQ issues.

She reported for HBO's Vice News Tonight, an Emmy award-winning nightly newscast, and covered the politics of climate change, life-threatening instances of environmental contamination, and the effect that global warming is already having on communities worldwide.

For more on Arielle

Follow Arielle on Twitter and her Reset podcast.

Episode credits

Hosted  and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Episode transcript

Shaunagh Connaire:

Welcome to Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire, and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who cover the issues that matter most.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

He turns to my producer who is grabbing the last piece of gear, and he says, "You know, I should really leave you here with a shotgun, but I don't have one with me. So if you see a polar bear, run."

Shaunagh Connaire:

My guest today is Arielle Duhaime-Ross, the host of Reset, a very cool technology and science podcast from Vox Media. Before that, Arielle was the first climate correspondent on American TV news, on Emmy award-winning HBO Vice News Tonight, where she did some really important reporting on the politics of climate change, and the effect that global warming is having on communities worldwide. Arielle, thank you so much for joining me on my podcast.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Well, thank you so much for having me.

Shaunagh Connaire:

You are currently in Brooklyn, is that right?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yes. Yeah, I am in Brooklyn. I am also currently in my tiny apartment in Brooklyn, in my bedroom closet recording this.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I love it. Well, we have that in common already. I'm also in my bedroom wardrobe in the East village. So we're only a few miles away. So Arielle, you have had a really, really interesting career to date. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about that? How you ended up as the host of an amazing podcast, a tech podcast on Vox?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah, so I didn't necessarily set out to be a journalist at all. That was not part of my plan growing up. I think this is actually a story that a lot of science journalists tell. Many of us seem to follow a similar path, which is that we fell in love with science. We thought that that meant that we had to be scientists. And then you do that for a while and you figure out that maybe your attention span isn't suited to it. Or maybe you're just not as detail oriented as a scientist needs to be. But you still love communicating it. You love talking about science, so you go into science journalism. So that's basically what happened with me.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

I was studying zoology because I wanted to be a herpetologist. I wanted to study reptiles. And during my last year of undergrad, I was listening to a lot of science podcasts and I realized that somebody was writing what I was hearing. You know, it sounds very basic when I say it now, but there is a sort of a light bulb moment where you're like people aren't just spewing things, this has been written. And so I went home and I Googled science journalism on a lark, thinking I had invented the term and all of these programs popped up including NYU's program.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

I ended up the next year doing my master's in science health and environmental reporting at NYU. It was like a life changing moment. It was great. So I completed my masters. And during that time, I also did three internships at Quartz and at Scientific American and at Nature Medicine, the scientific journal. And so I did well enough that I got hired right out of school for The Verge. I was a science reporter there for two and a half years. And Katie Drummond, who is now very high up at Vice, was the person who hired me there. And that worked out really well for me. And from there, I ended up working for Vice News Tonight on HBO, which is a now canceled, but was very good, documentary style news TV show. I was a climate change correspondent for Vice News.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Really, really worth noting that you are America's first ever climate change correspondent.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. We had the first climate desk in nightly news TV show. And that meant as my title also, I was the first person to hold that title. There's nobody else in TV that had that title at the time, and I think maybe still today. Don't get me wrong, there have been journalists on TV that have been doing climate change reporting.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Of course.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

But of course that title in and of itself meant something. It meant that Vice was taking climate change seriously enough, and saying, "You know what, we're going to have a dedicated desk where we're going to have a bunch of people who know what they're talking about, who do this all the time. And we're going to make sure that it is a pillar in our coverage." And I think that that was actually pretty significant.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It was really forward thinking. And was that Vice, or was that you?Did you pitch that to them and say, "Hey, I actually know what I'm talking about."

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Right. I wish I could take credit for that, but that is absolutely 100% Madeleine Haeringer and Josh Tyrangiel. They were the showrunners for Vice News Tonight. And they decided really, really early on, before they brought me on, that climate change was going to be a pillar of the show. And I very much want them to have all of that credit because I think it was really innovative.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It really was. And so from Vice/HBO, you went to Vox?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. The Verge, the website that I mentioned as being the first place that I worked for, is still today, a Vox Media website. It covers technology and also has a robust science coverage part of the website. Basically what I did was work at Vox, go to Vice and then go back to Vox Media. And now I am the host of Reset, which is a podcast about technology and science for vox.com.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Amazing. So you're actually my first interviewee who has a podcast. So this is awesome. So I'm already listening to the crisp, beautiful audio on the other end. This is just going to be so easy for me. Usually we have dogs barking, and hair rustling against-

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

You might still end up hearing my dog, Reggie barking. She's currently sleeping on the bed that is right outside the closet. And as long as no other neighbour does anything, we're good. But otherwise she will 100% bark, and that is just the way that it is.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Would it be accurate to say what you do is tell human stories through a tech lens?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. I think that is how we've been talking about Reset. It's funny, just this week somebody was recommending Reset on Twitter and tagged me in the tweet. And they described the podcast that I host as a podcast that talks a lot about the clash between technology and different aspects of human life. Whether it's culture or politics, ethics, what have you. And I thought that that was a really, really good way of describing Reset. And I think that I might steal that.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

So to that listener, thank you so much. I am definitely going to use that because I very much think that while I love technology and while we do celebrate technology in various aspects of the show, I also take a pretty critical lens. And I think that, that is part of my personality. It's part of who I am. And I think that, that's really, really important when you talk about technology today. And so that is maybe my new way of talking about the show. But we try and tell really human stories, maybe not the kind that you would typically hear as part of a tech podcast. I take a lot of pride in that.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Yeah. That's exactly what makes you stand out as well. Is there a sense, or maybe is it a goal of yours to really change mindsets? I guess I'm probably asking that question in light of your climate change reporting. Because that's a big job to undertake, especially here in the States where you have so many lovely deniers.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. I covered climate change for three years. I don't know if as a climate change correspondent, my goal was to necessarily change people's minds. I think it was to open people's eyes, which is slightly different. I think that it is very, very hard to convince an audience that is determined to ignore climate change, or determined to say that scientists are wrong, it's very hard to change their minds. But if you can put certain images in front of their eyeballs every week, I do think that it sort of chips away slowly. And I don't think that that is the case always, but I think it can help.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Now with Reset, I think that is the case. I don't know, again, I don't think it's necessarily changing minds, but I think it's opening people's horizons, opening their eyes, making them think of people who are very different from themselves. That's particularly important for me. I think that there have been a lot of instances where we have covered a certain policy by a tech company, and covered it from the angle coming from the standpoint of maybe a marginalized community. And that, I think is really important. I think people tend to think about the familiar. They think about their particular use case. And my goal is for people to think about many different types of use cases.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Yeah. That's so interesting, and that's what has struck me about all of your reporting, that you do use people. And I guess, you use empathy as a tool while reporting tech and science and climate change. That's quite different. That's not what's usually done. It's usually kind of hard cold facts that often don't move people. But you're doing the opposite.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah, and maybe that actually comes from the documentary show that I was a part of for a while. I found it really effective to be able to show people very intimate stories. And the way that Vice News tells these stories is actually by removing the correspondent as much as possible from these stories. And I think that that was actually very effective.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Now, I don't think that that Reset does that. I think that we try and as a host, to have me be not necessarily part of the stories, but active, and to have opinions. So I'm a little bit more vocal than I have been in the past in my journalism. But I do think that it really helps people to hear different people's journeys, and to just have an intimate moment with them. Intimacy, actually I do think can change people's minds.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. It's kind of raised another point in your career trajectory. You have experienced some hostility. I think I either read it or listened to it on another podcast. And obviously, Arielle, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have received death threats and rape threats and it's worth noting. So you're not just obviously a woman reporting on climate change, which is difficult enough, but you're a woman of colour and you identify as queer.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. I'm a black woman. I'm a black woman. I'm queer. Those things are all things that can cause a certain level of hostility. The specific instances where I've received these death threats and rape threats were on Twitter. And it's always hard to know how serious to take these things. But when you're first encountering these kinds of direct messages on social media, it's really, really startling. And it's really, really hard.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

There was a period during my career when I was at The Verge, the Vox Media website that I mentioned, where I was getting these messages regularly, multiple times a day because of some coverage that I'd done about a scientist at NASA who wore a shirt that was sexist. And we, myself, and a number of other science journalists for various website, had covered this issue and we were all harassed for months. Some got it far worse than I did. But it was bad.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

And I think that, that really, really had an impact on me for a long period of time. I very much turned inwards. I was protecting myself, protecting my family, trying to make sure that I wouldn't get doxed. Not that you can really ever make sure that you're not going to get doxed, but doing everything I can to make sure that my personal information was not put out on the internet. And it was a moment of fear a while, for sure.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Recently-ish, you had your folder on your podcast. So you're obviously past that now. You're willing to rope them in and get them to do some of the hard slog.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. I'm a little bit more willing to open up my life to listeners than I have been in the past. And I think I'm trying to do it gradually. I'm trying to feel out my comfort level with that. But yeah, my father, we had been doing this thing with Reset, where we were asking our listeners, especially at the very beginning of the pandemic, various questions about how things were going for them, some of them having to do with technology. And my father completely of his own volition decided to answer one of those questions, and sent us some audio. And so we included him in the podcast, and I think people got a kick out of that. Because he's got this great Trinidadian accent, and he's very scholarly in the way that he talks. I think it was kind of adorable, honestly.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That's awesome. Next question. Big question. Is there a moment in your career so far, that you could pinpoint as being something quite special, something that you're very proud of, or maybe it had tangible impact?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

I think I would point to a particular story that I wrote that I'm very proud of. I would like to think that it had an impact. I think it's always hard to measure the impact of a single story. But I think it raised a lot of awareness, and I do think that it embarrassed the Department of Health in Alabama, so I'm very proud of that. But it was a story about an issue of hookworm in Alabama. So I wrote this for Vice News in 2018. We also had a segment about this on the HBO show, Vice News Tonight. But I wrote a long feature that had a lot more context, and I was really part of that story.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

It tells the story of a study that was conducted in Alabama by a scientist named Rojelio Mejia. At the request of a woman from Alabama named Catherine Flowers, he had come to Alabama to investigate the issue because she thought that there might be a parasite problem in Alabama. The reason why she thought that is because there is a very large problem of raw sewage in Alabama. Especially in areas where black and brown communities reside, which tend to also be poor communities.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Basically the sewage system in Alabama is very much in cities. And then there's rural sewage, which is largely septic tanks. And the soil in Alabama is very clay-like. It does not absorb water very well, and so you need very special septic tanks that are extremely expensive. People don't necessarily have money to buy those special septic tanks and they fail. So there is raw on the soil in people's lawns everywhere. There's also an issue where some people don't even have a tank. And so instead they use something called straight piping, where they will just funnel a pipe from the bathroom to a few feet away from the home. And then the raw sewage will just end up on a lawn somewhere in a wooded area.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

That has caused an issue of parasites. The reason why hookworm was so significant is because for a long time, hookworm has been thought to have been eradicated in the US. John D Rockefeller, at the beginning of the 20th century, had this five year long campaign to try to eradicate hookworm. At the end of it, he said, "We did it. We did a great job." But that probably isn't at all accurate. Basically he just took off. He ended the campaign.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

And while it did probably have an impact, hookworm stuck around and there's evidence of it in the 1950s, in the 1970s, and even in the 1990s. But because of this campaign by Rockefeller, health officials and doctors stopped testing for hookworm. It was just like it was common knowledge that hookworm is no longer there. And so when Rojelio Mejia came to Alabama, specifically to Lowndes County in Alabama, at the request of Catherine Flowers, he tested the blood of a number of individuals and found that yes, in fact, they did have hookworm. It was in low levels, but still detectable through a DNA based test called the qPCR test. And then when they published the results, the Alabama Department of Health said that it was wrong. That there was in fact, no hookworm there, they completely contested it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

And so I went down there and I spent some time with Mejia doing a followup study. They were testing the soil. The results of that study haven't come out yet. Or at least at the time that I wrote. They might've come out now, actually. I should probably look that up. But at the time, the results had not come out. I really was there as he was doing this followup study, looking into it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

But I spent some time talking to the head of the Alabama Department of Health, and they explained to me why they thought the results were wrong. And I talked to a number of scientists who all told me it was almost certainly correct that Rojelio Mejia had used the most state of the art test possible for this. While the Alabama Department of health said that the test had not been approved by the FDA. Which that kind of test doesn't need to be proved by the FDA. It was all very sketchy. And so I called them out on it in a very lengthy article. I also looked into the history of hookworm, and that's why I'm able to tell you about John D Rockefeller.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I do want to point out how bad hookworm is as well, just for people listening, you know.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Right. So hookworm is a nasty parasite. Basically, the way that it propagates is that when people go to the bathroom, they will have eggs in their excrement. If you have a bad sewage system, then those eggs will end up in the soil. As people walk by tiny little larvae, we'll dig into a person's feet, go up, use their blood vessel, basically as a highway, their blood vessels as a highway. Go up to the heart, bypass the heart, and then go into the lungs.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

And then the parasite will actually crawl up the trachea and get swallowed so that it ends up in people's intestines. Intestines Americans would say. Sorry, I say a lot of things in a very Canadian way sometimes. And then they will feed on people's blood. It's in the intestines that they will mate, and then the cycle starts all over again. What it does is it can cause anaemia. It can really be a big problem in children, diarrhoea. Basically, it makes you very sluggish, and it can cause, you might have deficiencies because of it.

Shaunagh Connaire:

It's very serious. So after you did your subsequent reporting, what was the government's right of reply?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Right? I got comment from them. I called them out on a number of things. They said that they were trying to do certain things. And when I checked up, so they said they had gotten funding from the federal government for a specific program that would help people install septic tanks. When I actually called the federal government, they said, "Actually, they never completed the application and we never approved it." So all of that was in the article itself.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

In terms of impact, it's really hard to measure impact. I was definitely not the only person to have written an article about this. I think that I was the one who went the most in depth at the time. My hope is that it made them sweat. And I think that having a lot of times journalism, we want to think that it's a hero story. We want to think that a single story has a significant impact. I think actually, most of the time, it's having lots of people write about this from different perspectives. And then that puts pressure on the people in power. And my hope is that it had a significant impact and contributed to that.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Well, it definitely sounds like it. And I'm so happy we got to talk about excrement in my podcast. That's for sure. So thank you.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

I'm a science journalist. If we don't talk about poop, that means I'm failing.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I love it. Well, the next question, Arielle, is there a moment in your career that has been utterly crazy, that never made it to air?I'm sure there's loads, having worked at Vice, and stuff that's happened on the road that you'd like to tell our audience about?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

There's one. You sent me this question in advance, and I thought about it and there's only one story that really came to mind. This is something that wasn't part of the segment that we did on this. We used the footage, but we didn't talk about what happened to get that footage. But yeah, so this was God, what year was this? I think this was 20, early 2019. It might have been late 2018. I actually don't remember.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

But I went to Greenland, and we were covering a NASA research project where they are measuring ice melt in a really interesting way. Because it's actually, they're measuring ice melt under the water, not above water. And I think that, unfortunately, I think the way that we think about ice melt, having to do with climate change, is that we think about the sun hits the ice above water and that's where it's melting. It turns out it's melting in a much larger and much higher quantity under the water because of the way that ocean currents work. And so there's a lot of warm water deep below the surface, and that is actually the biggest issue. And so the scientists, that's what they were measuring.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

As part of that. We wanted to get beautiful beauty shots of glaciers. And so we had, or at least we thought we had booked a helicopter to go to Helheim glacier in Greenland. We arrived at the airport, and for whatever reason, I don't exactly remember what the screw up was or what happened, what went wrong. I really don't know. But we didn't have a helicopter. And so last minute, we were trying to convince this pilot to take us to the glacier. We didn't have a lot of time. I think we were supposed to leave the next day, and we were trying to convince him and he was basically fully booked for the day.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

So finally he tells us, "Okay, so I can take you to this glacier, but I'm going to have to leave you there and then come back and get you." We just really needed the shot. And so we kind of all looked at each other and we're like, "Okay, I guess that's fine." And so we take this beautiful ride on a helicopter. We're filming the whole time. It's great. We land on sort of a rocky mountain next to the glacier. And just as the pilot is leaving, he turns. I did not overhear this by the way. I was told this by my producer immediately afterwards. But he turns to my producer who is grabbing the last piece of gear. And he says, "You know, I should really leave you here with a shotgun, but I don't have one with me. So if you see a polar bear, run." And then he takes off.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Honestly, nobody had anticipated the polar bear line. There's nothing there. It's beautiful. There's a huge glacier that is, all you can see is glacier. And then there's this rocky mountain face that has some cute little Arctic plants. It's very peaceful and beautiful. And he just spews this line about a polar bear and we're like, "I'm sorry, what?" And then he has to leave, because he has to go take some other people on his helicopter who he just leaves. And he says, "I'll come back in an hour."

Shaunagh Connaire:

Are you able to get shelter anywhere? Is there a-

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

No, there is nothing. And I am looking around at this mountain and going like, "I guess I could run down, but this is really dangerous." If like-

Shaunagh Connaire:

I'm pretty sure a polar bear could outpace, no offence Arielle-

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

No, absolutely. I know that this polar bear can run in this mountain far faster than I ever could. They tell you with a grizzly bear, like if you run down a mountain, the momentum will make the grizzly bear fall. But I don't know if that works for polar bears in the same way.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I don't think it does. I've actually Googled this recently. I'm just back from Pennsylvania. We were battling with other types of barriers down there, but I've Googled it all, that does not work.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Right. Exactly. And so I'm like, "Ugh, okay, please just," I'm just hoping that this guy comes back at the time that he says he's going to come back. While we're there I do a stand up in front of the glacier. Everything looks great. We fly a drone because it's Vice and we love drones. We're safe on this mountain. Everything is fine.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

But then we have lunch. We have this pack lunch. Our hotel had made us these little sandwiches with smoked salmon and cream cheese in them, which was very nice of them. And I notice that my senior producer is sitting next to me and he is not finishing the sandwich. And he also has a little pile of rocks next to him. I think I asked him like, "Rubin, what are you doing?" And he proceeds to explain to me that if there's a polar bear, he'll throw the pieces of sandwich, and the rocks are also there. It was completely, it was the most ridiculous thing I can think of. Fortunately, no polar bears showed up. The helicopter, I think was 15 minutes late, and we got home safely. But just in that span of an hour, I remember thinking, "Wow, we are super screwed if this bear shows up."

Shaunagh Connaire:

Oh my God, that is so funny. And I bet you, I'm sure you had loads of security protocols-

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yeah. We have the sat phone. We booked this helicopter last minute, but we know what we're doing. We're careful about this. But for whatever reason, in our security protocol, polar bear did not show up on our radar at all.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That is so funny. I could just imagine, us at Vice, we can handle ISIS. We can handle the Taliban, but actually polar bears, not quite.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Nobody briefed me on polar bears.

Shaunagh Connaire:

Oh, that is so funny. That's such a good story. It's so classic tele, isn't it?

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Yes, extremely.

Shaunagh Connaire:

That's literally, it's a big part of the reason why I've done this podcast, because there are so many mental, mental stories from behind the scenes. The people just don't have any clue about what goes on. It's such a funny industry that stuff like this happens.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Oh yeah. There's always going to be something unexpected. Nothing ever goes the way you think it is, and you think it will. And no matter how prepared you are, you're going to miss something. That's part of the thrill. And I will say, I'm extremely risk averse. I'm actually a total scaredy cat about most things. But when it comes to trying to get the best story possible, I do actually care about that quite a bit. And that sometimes overrides this extreme desire for safety. And yeah, sometimes you just miss things.

Shaunagh Connaire:

I know I can really relate to that. That's such a good point. I think I've been in the position so many times whereby I know I was doing something really, really risky, but the fear of not bringing back a sequence or a scene to the edit suite, versus potentially being killed, or being injured in some way is way less scary to me than being in an edit suite without-

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

And then somebody turns to you and says, "Wait, you didn't get a beauty shot of a huge glacier. What were you thinking?" It's like, "Well."

Shaunagh Connaire:

[inaudible 00:27:40] It's so funny. Anyway, that's how mental our industry is. And that's exactly what this podcast is about. Arielle, thank you so much for joining me on my podcast.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross:

Well, thank you so much for having me. This was really delightful.

Shaunagh Connaire:

If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. And if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media @Shaunagh on Twitter, or @ShaunaghConnaire Instagram. And feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it. Until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.