Midday with Dan Rodricks

When a Florida Jury returned a not guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, the country broke into an outraged, Twittering frenzy. Accused of murdering her two-year-old daughter, Casey Anthony has been in the national spotlight for several weeks, as the news and entertainment media fed an American obsession with crime. While murders occur all the time across the U.S., Casey Anthony’s trial was somehow more appealing to the American appetite for reality TV. How did a local tragedy and crime story become a national sensation?

Dr. David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, joins Dan to talk about his first year heading up Maryland’s Public Urban University and his role on the Board of Advisors to President Obama on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Over half of foster children in Baltimore are teenagers but foster parents are reluctant to take them in. Finding homes for foster teens, with Molly McGrath Tierney, director of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, Stephanie Whitehurst, program manager of the BCDSS’ Resource Parent Recruitment, Retention & Training Unit, Dijohn Thomas, foster teen and president of the BCDSS Youth Advisory Board, and Sam Macer, foster parent and incoming president of the Maryland Foster Parent Association.

How did an educated, middle-class girl from Orange County, California go from earning $50,000 a year as an executive assistant to being homeless? At the age of 23, Brianna Karp, found herself on the streets, a casualty of the Great Recession, struggling to survive while coming to terms with the suicide of her father, a man who sexually abused her during her childhood.