Marrapodi, vice president for news programming at National Public Radio, refers to this covenant of truth as receipts, proof based on facts — not deception, not disinformation, and, most certainly, not lying.

“One of the things we talk about a lot is receipts. You better bring your receipts when you're a journalist and you're turning in a story because receipts matter,” said Marrapodi, a guest of Quinnipiac University’s Critical Conversations Speaker Series last week.

With a presidential election just days away and seven swing states expected to determine the outcome, transparency in reporting — with real voices in real time — is what NPR tries to do best for its listeners.

“We want to cover both sides completely and accurately, and if someone is lying, we will report that someone is lying,” Marrapodi said. “And if someone is hiding the truth, we will say that they’re hiding the truth. It’s our job in an election to go out there and cover things completely, honestly and accurately, and bring the receipts for the audience.”

Marrapodi’s talk in the Mount Carmel Auditorium was moderated by Mary Snow, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll and a former CNN political correspondent.

While Doug Schwartz, associate vice president and director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, had a prior commitment, other members of the Critical Conversations ad hoc committee were present, including David Fryson, the interim vice president for equity and inclusion, and Nadine Barnett Cosby, the new School of Communications dean.

“President Olian has asked us to provide a multitude of perspectives in these critical conversations, particularly as we enter the national elections next month, which to my mind is the currency of a well-ordered democracy,” Fryson said.

For Marrapodi, who served as NPR’s lead producer of live special coverage for the 2020 election, this moment is both urgent and massive. It’s critical to get the coverage right. While Marrapodi is committed to the work before him and his team, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel its weight.

“Given the climate of where we are, this race feels consequential and it feels heavy,” said Marrapodi, who met with student media before his talk. “It feels impactful on one side for people who identify as Democrats because they feel like democracy is on the ballot."

“On the other side, people on the right tell us they feel like the economy and immigration are overwhelming and there has to be a major change for them,” he added. “They feel like they're losing their country, so you have that real tension.”

Marrapodi said there are two ways the media can cover an election. Journalists can cover the horse race or cover the issues. But once President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, it became both — a horse race to November and a deep dive into Harris and her policy views.

While former President Donald Trump, a Republican, was already a well-known political figure, Harris was much lesser known. In July, when Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, the reporting quickly turned to the “Who is Kamala Harris?” stories.

And, just as quickly, it turned to the Electoral College map and the country’s seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“What we decided to do in covering those issues was put our journalists in places where we knew people were going to have an impact on the election,” Marrapodi said. “What do they care about the most? How can we dig into those issues? And how can we get a better sense of where that state is in the moment?”

Marrapodi said one of NPR’s most curious findings has been that gender is a bigger issue than race with many voters.

“I've been surprised by how real the gender issue is ... with Vice President Harris. It’s just been really interesting to hear people say that on the record to us, both men and women,” Marrapodi said. “That's been surprising in a place like Pennsylvania. Michigan was another place you heard that as well.”

With “razor-thin” margins in the presidential race, Marrapodi said he doesn’t expect the winner to be decided on election night.

Consider: In 2020, although Biden beat Trump by nearly 7 million votes in the popular vote, if 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin had gone to Trump, he would have been reelected as president, Marrapodi pointed out.

Snow, meanwhile, sourced some of the latest findings from the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“Some of the questions in our polls over the past couple of years are questions I never thought we would ask,” Snow said. “But we did ask a question in our national poll last month. We asked people how concerned they were about politically motivated violence following the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.”

The response was noteworthy — 73% of respondents are concerned, about 4-in-10 are very concerned and another third are somewhat concerned.

Marrapodi suggested a different perspective.

“I think it's worth remembering that as bad as things seemed in 2020, as a country, we’re pretty resilient and we made it through,” Marrapodi said. “There are a lot of people in this country at 9,000 different polling places that are run by volunteers and voting officials. We have a very sort of fragmented system intentionally for voting in this country."

“People of goodwill come together and work to keep those polls open to allow our fellow citizens to cast their ballots,” Marrapodi said. “That process has worked for hundreds of years, and I think it’s a pretty resilient system. I'm confident things will be OK. It might be rough. It might be tough. But I think America is a pretty resilient place.”