Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Community Podcast initiative where we explore diverse and inclusive ways of audio storytelling. Our goal is to connect community members through sound while providing an alternative for those underserved or misrepresented in traditional media. The CPI is based out of Mount Royal University on Treaty 7 territory. I'm your host, Gabriela Perdomo and in this episode we talk about words and how their meaning can shift.
It feels like politics and the media have become increasingly divisive in recent years. On top of that, the words we use to describe our values like democracy, truth and freedom, are loaded with dual meanings.
Carol off is an award winning author and journalist whose newest book, At a Loss for Conversation in the Age of Rage, explores how words and their meanings have changed. Through personal stories and extensive historical research. Her book examines how political forces have manipulated and transformed the meaning of six words in our common vocabulary. I spoke with Carol about how the definitions of those six words have shifted, whether they have fueled a war on words and how journalists can continue to seek the truth in an age of misinformation.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Carol, you built an extensive career based on telling stories and now you wrote a book about words, about the power of language, and about how we find ourselves in a moment where we seem incapable to even agree on what some basic words mean. Those words include freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice, and taxes. Thank you for joining me here today and thank you for writing this incredibly important book.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: Thank you, Gabriela.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Carol, are we in a war of words?
[00:02:28] Speaker C: It sure feels that way. I think that my sense that we have lost the language or the meaning of language that allows us to have civil conversations is the beginning of a war, and it begins with language.
As a journalist covering various conflicts around the world, that where I would arrive in some place like Bosnia or Kosovo or wherever, and people would be so surprised that something happened so spontaneously that suddenly this violence erupts and people are killing their neighbors. And where did that come from? But you can always trace it back to some years earlier, where the language, the words, were the first to create the war, the words sparked it, creating the sense of, of the other, creating this sense of conflict and division. And if you go through history, you find that that's exactly. We tend to look at the Nazis and Hitler as having just arrived in the late 1930s, and suddenly there was war all through Europe. But if you go back five, even 10 years earlier, you find that they were seeding the German language with all of these destructive tropes and words and rhetoric that created this anger and division. And so it paved the way for what would eventually become a physical and extremely murderous wars. And so that's for me, that, yeah, there is a feeling that there is a war with words because I think that's. It doesn't necessarily mean it will lead to physical conflict, but physical conflict always begins with the kind of language we're hearing now.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: And yeah, it also means that the risks are very real. Right. You do talk about the war in the Balkans, which you covered as a journalist, and you talk about it as the first act of the 21st century where the aggressors were, and I quote, propelled by a yearning for a single simple narrative. This is something you go into in this book, the danger of simple and simplistic narratives. Do you think we are living in a society that is afraid of complexity or unable to cope with complexity?
[00:04:51] Speaker C: I think it was already in that kind of was going in that direction when the COVID crisis hit. And I think that that was an extremely confusing time for people because it was just so radical when things were just shut down. When you couldn't go and see your a sick or dying family member in hospital, you couldn't see your newborn grandchild, you were seeing your friends and relatives die. You were hearing these conflicting narratives about what was causing it and how to fix it. We didn't have it here. We didn't know how long it was going to go on. It created a tremendous amount of insecurity. And that is always a groundwork for this need to look for some simple explanation for these things amplified in our era by social media, which was perfectly happy to provide simple conspiratorial narratives to explain complex things. And so people were driven toward QAnon, other YouTube conspiracy videos where obviously the big tech companies made a lot of money off of this seeking of that simple narrative.
But I think it happens to places, to civilizations where things suddenly become extremely complex and have conflicting meanings and it's hard for people to embrace contradiction.
And so we went through that in Covid. And so everything was already kind of confusing because of climate change and everything else. But those two really, really difficult years, I think laid the groundwork for a time when people seek out this almost what I call sentimental, which I use in a very negative way, but sentimental way of being comforted by the idea that everything is explainable through these narratives that don't even begin to embrace the reality.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: And I'm going to go back to social media in a moment, but one of the confusions or willful misinterpretations that you touch on is Our current inability to differentiate between conservatism and illiberalism, and I think this is so relevant to journalism in particular. So what is the difference between conservatism and illiberalism? And why is it so crucial that we understand that right now illiberalism is.
[00:07:25] Speaker C: Outside of the realm of democratic political environments? And so conservatism, conservative ideas, liberal ideas, and some of them even hard right, hard left, there's a spectrum, but it's all in a democratic society. It's all within the idea of democracy. It's all within the idea that we are. It's a give and take of ideas. Illiberalism lies outside of that scope. It turns against the idea of democracy, of inclusion.
Illiberal democracy, which is what some are claiming that they now are tending toward, including in the United States, means that it's only a small group would be able to benefit from that. That illiberalism tends to be to benefit a particular ethno national group and exclude those who are not members of that, but also turn against those who are.
It always craves an enemy. It craves somebody who's the other. And so that becomes us against them. So illiberal democracies, if you can call them democracies, illiberalism seeks this idea of a tribal, closed group that will have control over a political system, a civilization, a government.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: This actually brings me back to social media through the lens of something that you touch on constantly in the book. And is this idea that social media has been a catalyst for people intentionally wanting to sow chaos into our society? So I have a quote here where you say, number one, hacker way is where you can find some of the best jobs in Silicon Valley. It's also where truth was killed. This is about Facebook. Why is it important for you or why was it important for you to be so blunt about this?
[00:09:30] Speaker C: I wouldn't have known to be so blunt about this if it wasn't for Maria Ressa, who is the Filipino journalist who opened my eyes to so many things. And she was really one of the first. She and her. Her Rappler News online news agency were the first to sort of do a deep, deep dive to find out how Facebook was distorting politics, how it was being used by people like Duterte and various agents of chaos, as I called them, players who are trying to sew ideas into the public domain and with misinformation and disinformation. And so she was showing me how this works, and she was a great believer in Facebook. And in tech, because this is online news, this is like the future. We were all really excited about Facebook and Twitter during eras like that of the Arab Spring and other, the Orange Revolution, the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
These were opportunities to go, to talk to your people, to talk to supporters outside of controls of government. And they were really exciting. And then of course they saw, oh well, we can make money from this if we turn this into something that is useful to players who want to manipulate the information. And so we just saw how Facebook took, took advantage of that opportunity. Maria Ressa confronted Mark Zuckerberg. She went to a meeting with him and she said, can you not see what Facebook is doing, how it's distorting information, how it is what, how it is eroding, if not absolutely blowing up democracies in fragile places like the Philippines. And she said 96% of Filipinos get all of their information from Facebook. And so can't you see you have a responsibility? And his response to her was, Maria, but what about that other 4%? And that's all he thought of it as being. What's your problem?
And they don't seem to have come around to understanding, in fact, quite the opposite. We're seeing huge pushback. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that the Silicon Valley leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or to some extent Elon Musk and others, they really want Donald Trump to be elected because they feel that they'll be in a media environment where anything goes, where there will not be any restrictions. They fear the most that democratic players like Kamala Harris or others who are in the UK or in Canada who are pushing for a rights based and democratic solution to the problems that big tech is presenting, that they're really fearing that laws are going to be passed. We know that in Canada there are, there have been a couple of modest efforts to try and limit the influence, the negative influences of the big tech, of the platforms. And we know that Pierre Poliev of the Conservatives is said that he calls those censorship, he calls any limits on social media to be censorship. And one of the first orders of business he will introduce will be the elimination of any restrictions on what the big tech platforms can do. This is, this is music to Elon Musk's ears. And so, and so we now see this, this, this move toward these big tech companies who already dominate our, our landscape, being able to influence elections that will benefit them.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: And that's, that's still connected to this idea that these enormous tech organizations are contributing to those agents of Chaos that want to spread chaos that only benefits those groups and organizations that are very much interested in creating smoke screens and distractions so that they can implement their extreme agendas. And this idea that the chaos that we seem to be living with is manufactured, I don't know. And I mean, I wonder what your thoughts about these are. Do you think that as journalists, we understand that there is actually an intentional and manufactured chaos as opposed to. When we talk about. We're just very polarized, we're just very emotional. There's more to it than that.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: It's probably the biggest message I'm trying to put through with this book, which is that this crisis is for the most part manufactured, or at least it's played upon by those seeking power and those seeking money. We know from, say, just stick with the power part. First of all, we know from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who said that totalitarianism depends on these conditions so that you can. This is the way you can control people, that the idea of the big lie, of lying, like the way that Donald Trump lies, isn't to convince people of the lies. It's to break down the ability to figure out what's true to. So that people can no longer figure out what is true and false.
Because once you've got that, like, I don't know. I don't know what's true. I can't. You just. People just shut it out and they can't tell the difference between what's right and what's wrong, what's a fact, what's a lie. And so in that environment where there's just all this doubt, then it's very easy to control people. And so that's how demagogues seek power. That's the road to power. Autocrats and demagogues and, and want to be dictators. That is the best thing to do, is to break down our ability to understand what is true, what is factual. So they go after the journalists. The journalists are the enemy of this effort because we provide an independent source of information. We check facts, we present things that people are saying. Well, these are facts until we've tested them and found them not to be as factual. And we will keep revising that. We will keep seeking the truth. So these independent agents of journalists who are attempting to do that, they have to be destroyed, they have to be demonized, they have to be put aside. And so you see that everywhere, whether it's Donald Trump or it's Vladimir Putin or it's Viktor Orban or if it's Pierre Poiliev, they are this effort to seek ways to minimize the trust people have in the media. So that's the route to power. And then on the other side, sort of amplifying and compounding that is this source of money, because this dissent, this, this anger, this rancor, this rage, is that this the politicians are creating, this is the powerful emotions that keep people engaged online longer. And the longer people stay online, the more they are, the more time they spend, the more money the big tech platforms can make off of you and by advertising to you and also by scraping the data from your life in order to sell it as well. So you got these two powerful efforts, one about power and one about money seeking the same thing, which is to break down our ability to figure out what is true and to put us in a state of polarization and anger and fear and uncertainty.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: There's one really powerful quote about this very topic when you say the gullible will believe what they see and the cynical will conclude you can't believe anything. Both results are devastating for society because we need things to be true.
So in that note, I wonder how you feel sometimes and I wonder if you've gotten any pushback for people saying, well, you're just anti conservative right, like you're just too liberal, you're just a lefty trying to raise these points. But truly, the way I understand it, you're really raising an alarm for people to understand that we see what people are doing with these ultra right wing conservative networks that are global. And you have reminded us that there are some very well documented connections between extreme right wing movements and illiberal movements anywhere from Hungary to India's Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin, as you just mentioned, and so many others, including the Conservative Party of Canada. So I wonder if that's been difficult for you to make. Again, that distinction between.
I am raising an alarm against illiberalism, not against a particular conservative policy or party.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: I've tried to make it clear where I've been speaking that this could just as easily come from the left and in the past has come from the left, that from the illiberal left which moves into communism, it moves into its own totalitarian version of autocracy. And so it, and we have people like figures like Maduro who would represent that. And so it's not.
The right has no monopoly on this kind of foolishness. But right now, the particular time we're in, it is the right wing that has a tremendous amount of power and a tremendous amount of money supporting it. And so and that means that's why I focused on that. So I try to explain to people that this is not about liberal or conservative. This is outside of the realm of the normal spectrum of Democratic politics. And we have to be really wary of what it's about.
And so I think that the warning to people, and something I would say to journalists and journalism students who might be listening to this, is that our tendency right now is to blame ourselves for the. For the breakdown in trust. People no longer trust us. They think, oh, you can't. They're the lying media. They get everything wrong. And it's created a great deal of confusion and trepidation in our work. And so that we don't know what we're allowed to say.
We're just always sort of walking on eggshells, thinking that maybe we are getting it wrong and maybe we don't have it right, or maybe we are going to be attacked. Or I'm going to. If I write this story, I'm going to be attacked online. I'm going to be doxed, even. That's also what's happened. People's.
They've been. Their addresses and their names of their kids have been put up online after they've done a story that someone doesn't like. They get followed, they get attacked, they get horrible messages. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why we, as a profession of journalists is wary of even our job, of doing our job. But if the purpose of the book is to show that, let's find out who's behind this. Let's like, let's start digging into that, let's be. We're going to have to be really fearless in this. We're going to have to really just put our heads above the parapet, as difficult as that is, and point out who was doing this and why they're doing it and what the motivations are, and to do that fearlessly the way Maria Ressa has. And of course, Maria Ressa not only won the Nobel Peace Prize, but she also gets about a thousand threatening messages a day online, and she just has to stare that down and carry on. So it's a pretty. It's a really fraught environment we're now working in. But I think that if we're able to keep really focused on not that we're right and everyone else is wrong, that's not helpful either. But that, but who is really doing this? I think a lot of my colleagues, they tend to respond to ridiculous things that are said about them online. I look at what they're what's going on Instagram or, or, or, or X or Face or like mostly on. On X because Elon Musk is driving this. But. And they will there be some horrible thing that some about them and they will respond to it. I say just don't respond to them. I ignore it. Do not, do not even. I know as tempting as it is, but they're, they're, they, they're bots, they're, they're trolls. It's just, they're paid. Look at what's coming out of. We haven't even talked about the interest the Kremlin have in messing with our sense of what is right and wrong, what's true and false. I mean, that they know very, very well how important it is to break down our trust in journalism, our trust in facts, our trust in civil society. That's how they rule. That's how the Kremlin does its job. And so I think we have to be really, really cognizant of the fact that it is a manipulated thing. For the most part. Yes, we have things we should do better, but let's not fall into the trap that they've laid for us.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Also to make things a little bit more complicated. Speaking about avoiding simple narratives, the relationship between journalism and social media is also not as simple as it seems. Right. You have, on the one hand, you have these companies that have helped contributed in great part to tear apart the very fabric of the news industry. But on the other hand, many of them also continue to be the only place where people get their news, especially in Canada. This week, McGill Professor Taylor Owen spoke to the CDC about the impact of Meta's ban on news in Canada a year after it's been. It was implemented. And he said something striking. He said there are now about 8 million fewer views for each piece of information in Canada or news produced in Canada. That's devastating, right? That also speaks to our inability to reach our own audiences as well. So do we want or do we not want journalism and social media to make peace with each other?
[00:23:52] Speaker C: I would like to see other countries do what Canada has done by demanding that Canadian media gets compensated for its work. And I think that was the hope when this was put into play. And that's what Meta doesn't care about, the Canadian market. It's not that large for them. But if others, like, let's say India or countries in Latin America get this idea that this is how you should rule that the journalists that Meta should pay for things, well, that's going to cut into their profits. And so they have a vested interest in breaking this down and having us look for making peace with them because they would like this to not spread. When I hear, and I hate to keep harping on Pierre Poilievre, but it is our country and he is possibly the next prime minister, he has said that, that he will get rid of all of these censorship laws, including the one that has restricted our ability to see what's on and see our news on Facebook and Instagram. He will get rid of those censorship laws, as he calls them. He'll also get rid of all the journalism initiatives that exist to compensate and to give little pots of money to local media, local press, in order to enhance our coverage of smaller communities. Get rid of all the different, the online harms bill, and along with the online news bill, those are the two ones that he says are censorship bills. It's censorship. It's a censorship bill if you restrict the amount of hate that can be online. So, and he said that what has to happen is that the marketplace will determine. Well, first of all, he get rid of the dismantle the cbc. It's never clear exactly what he plans to do with the cbc, but he says it's the marketplace that should determine what we have access to. And so this, in the course of making peace with Meta and maybe making peace with the marketplace domination of our media, what would be left at the end of that?
I've warned people as I've talked to them across the country, you know, when you say, oh, you can't trust the media, I don't think that they're getting it right, blah, blah, blah, and you sort of reiterate all the things that are being said on social media.
Then what's the end result? Where are you going to go for your news about city council or about your local school board, or what's going on in your community, or whether the water is safe or whether the hospital is going to close, where are you going to get that information when that entire media landscape is gone, when it's a media wasteland, as it's already become in many parts of this country and in the United States, where you actually have paid for propaganda sites that have more reach into communities than local newspapers do? So where are you going to find out? You're not going to be able to find out that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk do not care if you know what's going on on city council this week, that it's not interesting to them. They're not going to make money from that unless it's rancor, unless it's anger and fear and rage. And so you know all these. So I don't think there is a place to make peace with big tech. I think we should be actually wishing that and hoping other countries join us in the effort to. And I'm going to make just one last remark. I'm not interested in having passing laws to restrict the content on social media. I think that the way should go and smarter people know how it would work better than I do. But the fact that they can make money from grabbing our data and spend, keeping us engaged and taking our data about ourselves and then packaging that and selling it, the fact they can make money off of us consuming false information is the problem. And so if you make it more difficult or impossible for them to make as much money or maybe even any money from our lives, from our information that we have posted online, then, then maybe they won't be so motivated to manipulate the message.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Definitely a longer conversation needs to happen there. But you mentioned that you've been talking to people, you've been traveling lately promoting your book. And I'm curious to know what are people saying to you? What are you hearing?
[00:28:35] Speaker C: I'm hearing really two things, one very alarming, one very encouraging. The alarming part I'm hearing is just how much ugly stuff is happening in their communities where people were. I've spoken with teachers and people on school boards and library boards and that people they work with are full of rage and blaming Trudeau for everything, blaming the media just obviously have bought the whole, all the tropes in the language, just being angry with government, being anti government, anti civil society, saying that anything about COVID or climate change, all that stuff for those are lies. And so they're actually in their work environment, their own colleagues saying these things or they're being having members of the, of the of communities and the public rage at them for these things and blame them for all kinds of things. Blame them for grooming their children in by teaching them about sexuality or teaching them about gender differences, blaming them for propaganda if they teach their kids about or about climate change or allow them to have books about same sex parents in school. All these things. Like they're getting this huge amount of rage and it really scares them and they just don't know, they don't know how to speak back to it. They don't know what to say. And so they ask me quite often what helped me with this. And I said, well, I'll just, I'll Just come to your next school board meeting. And you know, but they can't because it's just so much, it's just so angry and so personal in Pickering, just out, just very close to Toronto, that it's just astonishing how they kept to shut down their city council meetings. They've had to call in the police because of how violent it's become by a strong group that's. It's a Christian nationalist movement. Maga movements, you hear MAGA movements all across Canada, little mini magas happening, just picking up on the Trump stuff. So you got all of that. On the other hand, I'm hearing a lot of different efforts to bring communities together and to have bridge building and to find ways to talk to each other. And they are, and they're really interesting and they're worth cultivating. And they're not turning to the mega politics, not turning to Trudeau or Poliev or anybody and sort of even premiers because they feel they've lost their, they've lost their way and they're looking to each other. They're looking to, whether it's a book club or if it's a community group or if it's a church group, that's what they're turning to. Try and have conversations that the loud agents of chaos have been trying to shut down. They're turning to smaller groups where they can have conversations and try and solve some of the issues that they're dealing with.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Something I love about your book is that despite all of these important alarms that you're raising, you yourself are also very hopeful and you seem to have faith in our ability to get through this difficult time.
So what do you think this moment is demanding from us as a society?
[00:31:51] Speaker C: Can I answer that and say what it demands from us as journalists?
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Absolutely. That was my follow up question.
[00:31:58] Speaker C: Okay, well, I'll do from us as a society. I think that I, my first word in the book is freedom. And when I was, when I was writing the whole book, I was in this for two years, I was in a state of complete despair. I thought by the time I'd be talking to you, Gabriela, I, you'd be saying what a Pollyanna you are, that you actually think that we can have conversations when people are out there killing each other. I really thought it was heading to a really bad place. And it was. There was little hope. And then Kamala Harris walked on stage a couple of months ago and said, and said, we're not going back. We're not, this is not going to happen. We're not going to let this happen. And that politics of joy, as people now call it. So that was that as a society, gave me a great deal. I don't know if she. If she'll win or if she'll even be a good president, but that feeling that somehow there's all this parched grass all around me. And then suddenly a little rainfall came and everything just went ooh and perked up, and suddenly we have green grass around me. I just. I had that feeling of hope that came with that.
From the journalistic point of view, I think that this is a very difficult time that we're in. I'll let you pose the question because I think you've got a specific thing you want to know about that.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: No, I think, to be fair, I also want to say, to be fair to your book and to you.
You do talk about there's still time, we can still reclaim that language, and we can still redefine democracy in a way that's also more inclusive. Right. Like you give us a bit of a light in terms of telling us there is one. We have a choice and we can do things. And we can all agree that, yes, there's a lot of discontent, and that's valid, too. Right. And we can pick up from there and just. It doesn't. It doesn't mean let's go back to the 1950s or the 1980s even, but we can go forward and we can create a democracy that is better than it was before, but still working within democracy. So I just wanted to point that out, because I did get that from your book, even before Kamala Harris was walking on stage.
But, yeah, I do wonder, how do we, as journalists and educators rise to this challenge?
[00:34:19] Speaker C: One of the things that you probably noticed I did, which is unusual for a journalist, is that I talk quite a bit about myself and where I came from and my family. And I think that one of the first things we have to be able to do. I think Masha Gessen was also pointed. She taught me. They taught me a great deal, too. And Gessen. One of the things Gessen says is that you have to. As journalists, we have to show where we're coming from. And we can't have the view from nowhere anymore, which I'm still in. The New York Times, I think, is as good as that paper is. And the American media, they don't seem to understand what they're facing. And so I really worry about mainstream media that it doesn't get that I put myself in the book, not because I thought that I'm the story, but that I wanted to let people know where I come from, where my values come from, and that this. This entire story that I've written as a journalist, I've written the story of these words and what they represent. I've written it from the point of view of where I come from. And so, no, I don't want to go back to the 50s and the 60s when I was a child.
I don't think that we benefit at all from trying to recover something that's in the past, because it really wasn't perfect. We need to move ahead and make it even more inclusive and diverse than it's been. But I think that I wanted people to know that I came from this time that had certain values and principles that we created. I was a child when we were creating much of what we now call the social safety net, where we had the civil society, we have the democracy.
We didn't even have a flag until I was 10 years old, which, not that I'm a lover of flags, especially not anymore, but we didn't. We were just as a nascent country developing and trying to figure out who we were on the world stage and who we were to each other. And so what I saw at that time was an effort to pull together as a community to say, we have responsibilities to each other. We have response that freedom is really the freedom to take care of everyone who's here. That's. Democracy is an inclusive thing.
It's not an exclusive club. And so all these things I grew up learning in Winnipeg, where I spent my first part of my childhood, and then in Ontario. And so having learned from that, I wanted to say, this is where I'm coming from. A place where we saw probably the beginning of the healthiest time that this human species has had, where majority, where large numbers of people, if not majority of people actually have something to eat, where we were able to diminish wars, where we were able to deal with the first round of environmental disasters like acid rain or smog and effluence in the environment. We dealt with those things collectively as societies. We got rid of all kinds of pollutants and we built a society. We built social safety net. We built healthcare that took care of everybody, universal healthcare. It's flawed as it is. It's still an incredible thing that exists.
My mother had seven children and didn't lose any of them. And she didn't die in childbirth like her previous generation had. All these things happened because of. Not because we were really nice people in Canada, but because we worked together to try and make that happen. And so that's where I come from. That's where I describe, I describe a whole bunch of things in my upbringing that gave me a sense of promise and hope in civil society. And so I think we can rebuild that. I think we have to not just rebuild it with, you know, with carefully and with fear of what's out there, but build it with rebuild with imagination. I mean, just vision and imagination about where we might go and who we, who we want to include in this, which is everybody. I know it sounds, again, very Pollyanna, but I do have this idea that it's possible that we can start talking to each other again and start solving some of the huge problems we have if we shut out these noisy ideologue agents of chaos rage farmers who are trying to own the conversation. I think they're a really small minority. They just feel like they're larger and they're amplified by social media. And they say, we don't want you in the conversation. Take a hike. We are this majority of us in the middle are going to now start talking to each other and we want our political leaders to do that with us.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Take a hike. I love that we can end on that note. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your book. I say that very honestly. I loved it. Thank you so much for spending the time with me today and it's been a pleasure speaking with you.
[00:39:03] Speaker C: It's been a great pleasure for me. Gabriela. Thank you.
[00:39:20] Speaker A: That was Carol off, journalist and author of At a Loss for Words, Conversation in the Age of Rage. I'm Gabriela Perdomo, Editor in chief of JSource. Thanks for listening to this collaboration between JSource and the Community Podcast Initiative at Mount Royal University.
The CPI focuses on audio storytelling as a way to better include underrepresented voices. Our podcast is produced on the land home to the Niitsitapi, our Blackfoot Confederacy, the Ayetka Stoney, Nakoda Nation, and the Tsutina Nation. This land is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, districts 5 and 6. As media creators, we strive to uplift the voices of Indigenous peoples while strengthening our commitment to diverse and inclusive audio storytelling. You can learn more about JSource at J.Source CA and you can find the Community Podcast Initiative at ThePodcastStudio CA or on social media at CommunityPod YYC.
