Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning into CARP Radio, the official podcast of George Mason University's Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab, where we explore the science of scandal, character assassination, and reputation management.
Speaker: My name is Deirdre Jane Prega, and I'm a student at George Mason University and the Media Director for the CARP Lab.
Speaker: We're a team of international scholars studying character assassination in politics, entertainment, and science.
Speaker: To learn more about our mission and our work, including our scholars' most recent publications, visit our website at carpresearchlab.org and follow us on Twitter at carp underscore lab.
Speaker: I'm thrilled to kick off the second season of CARP Radio with an amazing guest, Dr. Nolan Hagdon.
Speaker: Dr. Hagdon is an author and university lecturer at Merrill College and the education department at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Speaker: His areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, and critical media literacy.
Speaker: He's also the author of multiple books that I'm sure are going to interest our listeners, including The Anatomy of Fake News, A Critical News Literacy Education.
Speaker: And his most recent publications include Let's Agree to Disagree, A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy with Mickey Huff and The Podcaster's Dilemma, Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism, co-authored with Nicholas Baham III.
Speaker: Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas.
Speaker: And in addition, he has been a source of expertise for CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and most recently, and of course, most importantly, CARB Radio.
Speaker: Dr. Higdon, thank you so much for coming on this show.
Speaker: I'm so excited to be able to speak with you.
Speaker: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker: I want to start off with maybe a little bit of an obvious question, but can you tell us a little bit about your background besides what we heard in your awesome bio and what drew you to media history and media studies specifically?
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And yeah, I sound a lot better on paper.
Speaker: But my background sort of began, I mean, it was really shaped by my youth in a lot of ways.
Speaker: One of my earliest memories of talking about media with my parents was there was something on television that there was a commercial for and I wanted to buy it right away because the commercial was convincing.
Speaker: And my mom and dad sort of talking to me about how you can't trust those ads and those things aren't always true.
Speaker: And like, I don't know, that lesson really always always stuck with me, this healthy skepticism that I sort of took in life.
Speaker: And but if I had to say, you know, what was kind of like a consequential moment, I think it was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Speaker: I was just starting college and watching the public, you know, watching otherwise rational people say irrational things to justify an invasion based on a series of lies.
Speaker: And the news media was parroting those lies was really just raised so many questions for me.
Speaker: And
Speaker: At the time, I wanted to be a historian, and I was talking to other historians who were saying, you know, this has happened before.
Speaker: This happens every time there's a war.
Speaker: The media and the government lie to the public and get them into war.
Speaker: And so my fascination just kind of
Speaker: kind of built from there about the importance of critical thinking as an anecdote to fake news, but also just what is this history?
Speaker: Why does news media, which exists to serve us, sometimes mislead us?
Speaker: And that kind of was the journey that takes me to where I am now.
Speaker: I can actually relate to a lot of that.
Speaker: I remember always being interested, one of the first things you learn in communications classes when they do the history of communication is about the Creole Committee and the World War I propaganda.
Speaker: And I, as you might be able to tell by my last name, I'm of a German extraction.
Speaker: And I always had very negative feelings about the Creole Committee.
Speaker: Yeah, looking in more into history, I was always into reading about yellow journalism and like the Spanish American War and all that jazz.
Speaker: And I think that that gave me a certain perspective on especially how media acts during a crisis and bends the truth during a crisis.
Speaker: So I can relate to a lot of that.
Speaker: It's really interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's interesting, and you bring up the Creole Commission, which is a spot on kind of example to choose.
Speaker: You know, there's always, rightly so, so much of like a fixation on like Nazi Germany propaganda, right?
Speaker: Like about the ways in which the Nazi regime were motivating people to do horrific things.
Speaker: But a lot of the Nazis, they study what the Creole Commission did here in the United States.
Speaker: That's where they got a lot of those ideas about how to motivate the population with like imagery and appeals to history and nationalism.
Speaker: And of course, they amplified them with new technologies.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Yeah, sort of, you know, where I was in 2003 in the invasion of Iraq, I thought this was all like new, first time ever, you know, I was experiencing something transformative.
Speaker: But history really gave me that necessary context to understand it.
Speaker: That's why I'm always so appreciative of history and looking at media through a historical lens.
Speaker: That ties into your specialty, which is something called critical media literacy.
Speaker: I want to ask the obvious question about that.
Speaker: What is critical media literacy and how does it differ from other types of media literacy, education, or philosophies?
Speaker: I believe you referred to as a critical media literacy in one publication I saw.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, we were talking a moment ago about kind of my progression in the field and, you know, I owe a lot of my success to a, you
Speaker: person who you wouldn't expect.
Speaker: But I have to say, Donald Trump's weaponization of fake news all of a sudden brought attention to the work we had been doing, me and others, for decades before I got into this.
Speaker: But all of a sudden, when he weaponized fake news, like the New York Times was reaching out to me and stuff, all of a sudden now they were interested in this work.
Speaker: But but since the sort of what I consider to be a moral panic over fake news, I thought one of the big problems is a lot of people were creating the incorrect goals, which you just alluded to, which they were trying to get rid of fake news or get rid of fake news producers and.
Speaker: You can't.
Speaker: Humans have the ability to imagine and create, which is one of the coolest things about being a human.
Speaker: But it also means we can imagine, create and believe total BS.
Speaker: So we're always going to create false information and we're going to believe it.
Speaker: It's really a question of how do you manage it.
Speaker: And critical media literacy is a much better approach.
Speaker: than a critical media literacy, which we talk about here in the States.
Speaker: And in most other countries, you don't need to make a distinction between critical and a critical.
Speaker: This is really a US thing.
Speaker: There's sort of a battle in the United States, thanks to our addiction to capitalism and our corporatist society.
Speaker: But essentially,
Speaker: as we became a much more mediated society, meaning we were all using media more and more often, this goes back to radio and television and then the internet and now the smartphones and the digital technologies and the advent of social media.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: There were people very early on decades ago said, you know, we should really teach folks how to manage this.
Speaker: How do you you know, how do you approach film intellectually?
Speaker: But there was a debate.
Speaker: Some people wanted to just teach about media, like how do you create media and how do you appreciate media?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's like the arts and people.
Speaker: There are other people who are terrified of media.
Speaker: So how do we protect the kids from the films?
Speaker: Those are the protectionist approach.
Speaker: And there were some media literacy folks who said like, no, we should teach students, you know, how to analyze this stuff and how to use this stuff and how to create this stuff.
Speaker: But there became a schism.
Speaker: Some of those folks wanted to allow corporate media a seat at the table for helping to instruct people on how to create and analyze media.
Speaker: Those are the acritical folks.
Speaker: And then there are my folks who are the critical folks who said, you know, no, we need to kind of
Speaker: Instead teach students how to investigate the power dynamics of those corporations, how those corporations power influences the media that's created.
Speaker: And this isn't just corporate power, this is racial power, gendered power, etc.
Speaker: And so there's been a schism for decades between the critical and the acritical approach.
Speaker: For the average person, basically it means us in the critical role, we really reject the corporate funding.
Speaker: And we like to look at the way in which the pedagogical approach has power dynamics invested in.
Speaker: And we should investigate that the same way we investigate media, where the acritical folks think that's somehow politically biased to look at those things.
Speaker: I want to dig in on a couple of things you mentioned and just do some basic definitional stuff.
Speaker: First, I want to ask, you mentioned corporate media.
Speaker: Can you define corporate media and talk about that?
Speaker: And then I also wanted to ask, when you use the term critical, are you related to critical methods and how are critical methods used in your ideal media literacy pedagogy?
Speaker: OK, yeah, great question.
Speaker: And
Speaker: The question of corporate media, it's really a question of who funds the media you consume, right?
Speaker: So that's why when someone says something like, quote unquote, the media, generally that's kind of lazy.
Speaker: We should be a little more precise in what we mean by the media.
Speaker: And usually what people mean is legacy corporate media.
Speaker: That is these dominant media outlets that are funded by corporations that are used by the majority of the population and thus very influential on the ways in which the population sees their world.
Speaker: So this is your Washington Post.
Speaker: This is your New York Times, your Fox News channel, your MSNBCs, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, all the way down the list.
Speaker: Then there's independent media.
Speaker: That doesn't mean they're like ideologically independent.
Speaker: It means they're independently funded outside of corporate media.
Speaker: This can be things like Democracy Now!
Speaker: is independently funded media.
Speaker: Breaking Points podcast is independently funded media, Substacks are independently funded media, Counterpunch, you know, et cetera.
Speaker: So it's really a question of who funds the media.
Speaker: And the reason that it's so important from a critical perspective, and I haven't lost your question about defining the critical, but the reason why that's so important from a critical perspective is we believe that with funding comes influence because funding is a
Speaker: uh funding allows these people to exert power and that power leads into influence so we think it's very important that if you're reading the washington post you know that jeff bezos owns it um because his wealth and power have an influence over over that paper um and so you know same thing goes with like a social media platform you know if elon musk did buy twitter it'd be very important to know elon musk controls twitter
Speaker: So that's kind of why we put that up front.
Speaker: And to what I said earlier, a lot of media scholars and media literacy practitioners, they'll rightly ask those questions, right?
Speaker: They'll say like CNN has corporate money, so corporate money must influence CNN.
Speaker: But then if you ask them, hey, corporations fund the content you're bringing in your classroom.
Speaker: Does that funding affect your classroom?
Speaker: Then all of a sudden that funding doesn't matter.
Speaker: That question becomes political.
Speaker: So we're just asking people to ask the same questions about their pedagogical approach that they would ask about the media they investigate.
Speaker: To your question about
Speaker: In critical media literacy, it comes from the field of critical, sorry, the approach of critical theory.
Speaker: And in terms of media, this comes from the Birmingham and Frankfurt schools.
Speaker: That's that cultural studies approach, as well as the power dynamics vested in media.
Speaker: And within that comes only critical theory, but critical thinking, not necessarily critical in the negative approach, but critical inquiry.
Speaker: So the power dynamics, critical thinking, that's the approach critical scholars take to media literacy.
Speaker: Thanks for giving that definition.
Speaker: I think it's really useful.
Speaker: And I think it can be confusing because people hear critical theory or critical media literacy and they think, oh, you're criticizing the media.
Speaker: And obviously, I'm sure you're criticizing the media, but it's not just banging on the media.
Speaker: It's looking for that hidden ideology in some ways and how that affects what we read, what we see, et cetera.
Speaker: So thanks for that.
Speaker: I have a question.
Speaker: You've mentioned a couple times media literacy programs in classrooms and how those are funded by different corporate media sources.
Speaker: I'm not super educated on the world of media literacy education.
Speaker: For context, I graduated from high school in 2018 and I got a little bit of media literacy education.
Speaker: So it basically boiled down to, you know,.org and.gov is better than.com.
Speaker: Be wary of Wikipedia.
Speaker: Just curiosity.
Speaker: What are some of the big name media literacy education programs?
Speaker: Who funds them?
Speaker: And what do you think are the shortcomings of current media literacy approaches that are out there in schools and kids are getting exposed to in middle and high school?
Speaker: I don't know if it's big in elementary schools.
Speaker: I can't remember it from my time there, but middle and high school, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, we don't really have much data on how many students are getting access to media literacy education simply because the decentralized nature of the United States education system really...
Speaker: discourages like a national media literacy program, right?
Speaker: And then locally, particularly after the moral panic over fake news in 2016, we've seen a lot more states and districts adopt media literacy language, but usually it's pretty toothless in the sense that it's not required.
Speaker: Even if there is some like requirement language, teachers really don't undergo professional development to learn how to teach it.
Speaker: And then there's always been this outstanding debate and
Speaker: I don't even know necessarily where I come down on if it should be an either or both, but between if media literacy should be a standalone course or it should be integrated across the curriculum.
Speaker: And so for all those reasons, we really don't know much.
Speaker: Given a lot of the studies we've seen, particularly from like the Stanford Education Group and others, media literacy skills are waning amongst the population of all age groups.
Speaker: Older people love to pick on young people.
Speaker: Young people love to pick on older people.
Speaker: But just across the spectrum of age, we have weak media literacy skills in this country.
Speaker: So your question is,
Speaker: your question really brings about this kind of chicken in the egg question, which is, well, what do we do?
Speaker: Do we spend all of our time and resources maybe training the generation of educators so then they can train the next generation of students?
Speaker: Or do we even have that time or money to spend or should we go directly to the students now?
Speaker: And if so, how do we do it without the educators, et cetera, right?
Speaker: So you see where this becomes like a problem.
Speaker: that we're facing.
Speaker: Private industry has always been willing to step in here.
Speaker: You know, Zoe Druick wrote about this really great in 2016.
Speaker: She wrote about the history of this.
Speaker: And my dear sister, Alison Butler, and I have written about this with corporate media literacy.
Speaker: But
Speaker: corporations are willing to come in the classrooms to give desperate districts and desperate teachers a quick fix.
Speaker: You want media literacy ed?
Speaker: Great news.
Speaker: We've got, you know, channel one video you can show students every morning, which is, you know, corporate indoctrination.
Speaker: Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Nickelodeon will make content for the classroom that looks great.
Speaker: You know, it's slick things that teachers see.
Speaker: And they finally, if they don't have media literacy training, they can integrate in the classroom.
Speaker: Facebook, you know, now meta.
Speaker: whatever grift they're running or calling it.
Speaker: They now train, you know, thousands of educators like over a weekend.
Speaker: So that's, and a lot of these corporations fund, you know,
Speaker: sort of projects with educators to normalize this corporate media education.
Speaker: Namly, the National Association for Media Literacy Education is one of the big ones.
Speaker: They take corporate funding.
Speaker: They've created things like they being corporations, like NewsGuard have been created between corporations,
Speaker: That's NewsGuard includes corporate leaders, members of the military industrial complex, and the former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who's known as anti-labor and not really much to say on education.
Speaker: And their version of media literacy when it comes to fake news, they being NewsGuard, is basically just teaching students which websites to trust versus which ones not to trust.
Speaker: And that's why what you just said about Wikipedia really resonated with me, which is when I get students, by the time they get to me in higher ed, you know, they say like, oh, we were told not to use Wikipedia.
Speaker: And I'm like, OK, well, why should you not use Wikipedia?
Speaker: So they didn't tell us that.
Speaker: They told us not to use Wikipedia.
Speaker: There is a reason you shouldn't use Wikipedia, but to really teach, to educate is to explain why, to get students to understand the problems with Wikipedia, not just tell them don't use this website, don't trust this.
Speaker: That's indoctrination.
Speaker: That's not education.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: A critical approach is much different in that sense.
Speaker: Now, having said all that doom and gloom I've just outlined to you so far, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker: There's a lot of people who do this work as volunteer or through nonprofits.
Speaker: I'm associated with Mass Media Lit, which does teacher education.
Speaker: It's me, Allison Butler, who's phenomenal.
Speaker: media literacy professional development if anybody out there is interested in media literacy professional development um please reach out to allison butler and ben boynton um who's really great does great k-12 work uh project censored is another great non-profit been around since the 1970s um with a focus on news literacy from a critical perspective um the critical media project at usc does a lot of phenomenal work with free resources particularly aimed at parents um and that's from allison trope who's
Speaker: Just an amazing person, friend.
Speaker: And then another one I would recommend too is Jeff Scherer works for UCLA.
Speaker: And he has the Education 166 Library Guide, which is free.
Speaker: And he's accumulated all the resources for critical media literacy ads.
Speaker: So if you're someone interested in getting this, it's all free.
Speaker: But from what you can tell from my description is a lot of this work is being done by folks who are really just passionate about it.
Speaker: We don't reach as many educators as Facebook, but we do what we can.
Speaker: And that kind of is the landscape of this right now.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I appreciate you sharing those resources, especially anyone who might be listening who is an educator or just a parent themselves can probably benefit from that.
Speaker: I often think in the discussion of media literacy education, there's a lack of acknowledgement of the role of parents and the role of the family.
Speaker: Especially when you mention that media literacy is down among all age groups.
Speaker: It's kind of something that everyone can get into as a family.
Speaker: I totally, totally agree.
Speaker: I mean, one of the, I don't know, kind of one of the horrible cultural outcomes of like the neoliberal era we live in is that there's like a knee jerk reaction that we have to turn to quote unquote experts, but that's BS.
Speaker: A lot of this work can be done community level and in families.
Speaker: And, you know, it can make things like TV watching time more fun if you all sit around the TV and critique the show that's on versus kind of mindlessly consume it.
Speaker: You might have a better evening at your house.
Speaker: I know making fun of commercials is always a favorite pastime in my family.
Speaker: I'm like, I saw the dumbest commercial for granola bars.
Speaker: It's true though, right?
Speaker: I think TV, it tries to make you kind of just like passive where we're social beings.
Speaker: We want to talk with ourselves or talk back to our TV, if you will.
Speaker: And so it can make it a little more fun to approach it like that, I think.
Speaker: To return to something you mentioned, media literacy being in decline among all age groups.
Speaker: I'm curious about that, what you think the root causes of that might be, because I think it's interesting that we simultaneously have such a low trust society where people do think everything is a lie, everything is fake news.
Speaker: We don't trust what we see ostensibly, but at the same time we do.
Speaker: I consider myself a pretty skeptical person and I've always been that way since I was a kid.
Speaker: And because I'm in communications, I've read a lot of stuff about persuasion, stuff about rhetoric.
Speaker: And I sometimes find myself being convinced almost automatically by the dumbest stuff ever.
Speaker: YouTube comments, Amazon reviews, they'll make some claim, it's supported by nothing.
Speaker: The rational part of my brain knows it's supported by nothing, but I just find myself assuming almost at an automatic level that it's true.
Speaker: And I always wonder, is there something about the digital environment itself that makes us just assimilate information a certain way, maybe some way it's exacerbated?
Speaker: And if there's some truth to that, can media literacy education combat that reflexive persuasion?
Speaker: Yeah, and you're connecting two really important things here, kind of a news literacy and a digital literacy, which are both under the umbrella of critical media literacy.
Speaker: So I think on the first part about the lack of trust in media, you don't...
Speaker: you don't need to be able to write like a dissertation to know that something is wrong with American news.
Speaker: You know, maybe they can't articulate it in some like scholarly prose, but if you talk to the average person, people know something is up.
Speaker: Like what they hear on this channel or in this paper is totally different from their lived experience.
Speaker: So they at least get that.
Speaker: And then they have, you know, these,
Speaker: huge events to show, right?
Speaker: Like the reporting around, I've brought up the Iraq war, but the reporting around like the financial collapse in 08 or the fact that polls are always wrong.
Speaker: You know, these ginormous stories like Russia Gates or what was the QAnon, these stories, right?
Speaker: These big media stories that turn out to be
Speaker: false or have baseless aspects to them.
Speaker: People see these things and they have a healthy sense of skepticism develops, but then it becomes a rejection of everything, which is what I think you're pointing to.
Speaker: Still, though, at the heart of it, we're all susceptible to believing baseless or false claims, right?
Speaker: Especially when we've been indoctrinated with them forever, right?
Speaker: You think about appeals to like nationalism or defense of the capitalist society or, you know, notions of like supporting our troops means supporting every war.
Speaker: These things are really indoctrinated in you.
Speaker: And so if you can have slick, persuasive,
Speaker: content that appeals these ideas, we're susceptible to go with them unless we can kind of stop and think.
Speaker: That means we have to have the power as an individual to slow down and analyze what we're thinking through.
Speaker: But we also need to have a culture and a community where we're allowed to raise these questions without being finger-wagged or dismissed into obscurity for daring to ask questions about dominant discourses.
Speaker: And frankly, we really just don't have that culture and social media works opposite to that goal.
Speaker: Digital culture is such that it gets you to react.
Speaker: These platforms give us the information that we like.
Speaker: Study after study shows we like to be confirmed in our views.
Speaker: We'll engage with things we totally disagree with only if we think we can quote unquote own the other side, not if we think we have to do the critical work to actually engage with the other side on a deeper humanistic level.
Speaker: And that's just antithetical to critical thinking.
Speaker: We can't critically think if we can't engage with ideas we disagree with and understand.
Speaker: We can't critically think if we can't just slow down and think through things.
Speaker: And so in that way, digital culture really does contribute to that.
Speaker: And you see this constantly.
Speaker: People like and share articles without reading them.
Speaker: They say horrendous things to people they would never dare say to someone's face.
Speaker: I like to call it keyboard courage.
Speaker: So I usually, when someone says something horrific to me online, I like to invite them to come see me one-on-one.
Speaker: So these kinds of things are just, in that way, social media is really just not conducive to critical thinking.
Speaker: At the same time, we have this illusion that on the internet, we have access to all of the information, and that's simply not true.
Speaker: depending on what platform we're using, they curate the content that not only they think we want to see, but the content we engage with.
Speaker: And the content we engage with tends to appeal to emotions of like hate and fear.
Speaker: So if you want to keep me on, you know, say Twitter, show me the most horrendous things that are going on in the world and make me feel like I'm doing something about it by commenting on them.
Speaker: And that's exactly what social media does.
Speaker: We have, you know, millions, billions of users who have the delusion of power that are engaging with some of the worst things on Earth and, you
Speaker: Building these sort of like Twitter mobs that are more interested in getting joy from destroying people in online spaces versus actually being critical thinkers who constructively try and participate in a democracy.
Speaker: I want to ask you about one phrase you used, the delusion of power.
Speaker: Carp's last conference focused on the intersection of character assassination and cancel culture, online mobbing, public shaming, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: And in some interesting research, which was presented by Emily Fogles from the Pew Center, showed that people's attitudes on cancel culture break down into two basic groups.
Speaker: One essentially agrees with the idea there's this climate of hyper partisanship.
Speaker: Everyone is intolerant of the mere existence of opposing views and people are using the internet and platforms like Twitter and Instagram to punish and shame anyone that holds the views they disagree with.
Speaker: And then the other group, maybe they say people are being called out and publicly shamed online, but you know what?
Speaker: That's not destructive or illegitimate.
Speaker: It's actually good because it's accountability.
Speaker: It's people who have been historically silenced and shut out of the institutional paths to access justice, using social media to seek justice for themselves in this democratic way.
Speaker: And it views social media as this leveling or democratizing tool.
Speaker: You argue that that dichotomy is false, right?
Speaker: And the users really don't have any power at all.
Speaker: They have this delusion that they are in power.
Speaker: So can you tell us more about that and who really has the power on social media?
Speaker: Yeah, you summed up my, actually, my conclusion on this really well.
Speaker: I don't know where you read that at, but yeah, that was perfect.
Speaker: That's, because I have a chapter coming out, actually, on exactly what you just described, so you must be working for the NSI.
Speaker: Anyways, but yes, correct.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: For good reason, we like to get mired in the weeds over, you know, should we be going after hate speech?
Speaker: Should we be removing racist?
Speaker: Should we be removing sexist?
Speaker: Of course, I'm 100% on board removing those ideologies and that in that comment, in those comments, and holding people accountable who hold those views in a theoretical sense.
Speaker: But but the
Speaker: More, I guess, the more difficult question is, well, how do you do it?
Speaker: Like, how do you get rid of white supremacist ideology from our culture?
Speaker: How do you get rid of patriarchy from our culture?
Speaker: And if your solution is to empower unaccountable oligarchs from big tech in Silicon Valley, I'm not really with you.
Speaker: I don't think their commitment to being anti-racist or being anti-sexist or opposed to homophobia and other hateful ideologies
Speaker: It is founded.
Speaker: In fact, it's just the opposite.
Speaker: The research shows that Silicon Valley is as sexist and racist as they come.
Speaker: I mean, Sophia Noble wrote the book Algorithms of Oppression to show how Silicon Valley's algorithms were reflecting the racism and sexism of the industry.
Speaker: Emily Chang wrote a book called Brotopia focused on the
Speaker: the sexism of the industry.
Speaker: Ravenel and others have written about the classist ideology of Silicon Valley.
Speaker: And let's not forget, all of these tools were made by the military industrial complex.
Speaker: And these companies didn't invent touchscreen or Siri or GPS.
Speaker: They just put a happy emblem on them, right?
Speaker: Like the Facebook thumbs up or Google's colorful letters.
Speaker: So we could make military industrial complex tools more digestible.
Speaker: So if users think they're actually holding other people accountable, they're simply just wrong.
Speaker: It's the oligarchs of these platforms who are determining whether or not they want to hold these people accountable.
Speaker: And they can change their mind at any moment.
Speaker: So really, when you're going through this exercise, you're just normalizing their power.
Speaker: And you're becoming kind of willing, willing henchmen for them.
Speaker: And to give you an example of this, right, I know everyone thinks Silicon Valley is this big, like democratic liberal platform.
Speaker: These are these are oligarchs who are motivated by profit.
Speaker: I mean, people forget that the Trump administration worked with Facebook.
Speaker: closely in 2016 to figure out how to operationalize their tools to help his campaign.
Speaker: Zuckerberg continued to work with then-President Trump throughout his presidency, and it was only once Trump lost the Electoral College in 2020 that all of a sudden they shifted gears and they were back to the Democrats with Biden, just like they had been with Obama during his eight years.
Speaker: So they shift with the political winds.
Speaker: So yeah, today maybe they're happy to remove like
Speaker: anti-racist and anti-sexist.
Speaker: But if Trump comes back into office in 2024, maybe then they need to remove people against MAGA because it's unpatriotic.
Speaker: And all you've done is simply empower these platforms to normalize their ability to remove content.
Speaker: So that's the critique that I have about the ways in which we're going about fighting these ideologies in digital spaces.
Speaker: Throughout our conversation, you've been talking a lot about how important 2016 and the Trump presidency was, not just for your study of critical media theory and your career, essentially, but how so many of the conversations we're having right now, the conversations about media literacy, misinformation, disinformation, they all stem back to that point.
Speaker: Especially members of what you might call the corporate media, other people call the mainstream media, have taken a leading role in this crusade against fake news and misinformation.
Speaker: And you've called that a couple times in our conversation a moral panic.
Speaker: I know from some of your other work, you've highlighted how people spread fake news while trying to fight it.
Speaker: I would love to hear you discuss more about that.
Speaker: Why you think the current alarm bells that are being sounded on the topics of misinformation and disinformation
Speaker: our type of moral panic, why they meet that criteria and some issues with how we're discussing misinformation and disinformation right now?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: Fake news has been around forever.
Speaker: Donald Trump didn't invent it.
Speaker: And so to,
Speaker: to reduce the whole Trump phenomenon down to fake news is simply just misleading the public.
Speaker: There are so many other factors that went into Trump's popularity.
Speaker: And I think, you know,
Speaker: Trump's popularity was basically rooted in a rejection of the status quo.
Speaker: Now, of course, look, Trump is a grifter who co-opted people wanting to resist the status quo.
Speaker: He's in no way some like man of the people, far from it.
Speaker: But he was smart enough to realize he could co-opt this general anger.
Speaker: For those who are in the status quo,
Speaker: They, you know, they sort of had an option.
Speaker: They could say, like, you know, how do we how do we recapture that that legitimate anger people have at us?
Speaker: What can we change to mitigate that anger?
Speaker: Or we can make up a million excuses to pretend it doesn't exist.
Speaker: And that's what they did instead.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Hillary Clinton didn't lose because she ran a horrible campaign and because the Democratic Party.
Speaker: and members of the media colluded together to marginalize the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign, right?
Speaker: Instead, she lost because of Russians and fake news.
Speaker: You know, they'll never admit that the public had a rejection of the status quo.
Speaker: You know, they'll never admit that, yes, Obama symbolically being the first African-American president was huge for the country.
Speaker: I remember being there on election day, studying history, thinking like, this is something I thought I would never would never see.
Speaker: But the guy had to govern for eight years.
Speaker: He lost a thousand seats for his party.
Speaker: You know, the economic conditions for the majority of Americans got worse.
Speaker: He turned to austerity conditions, which disproportionately hurt the working class and poor.
Speaker: So that anger was palpable.
Speaker: It was real.
Speaker: Now, Trump, a grifter, ended up taking it.
Speaker: But rather than sort of learn from that lesson and kind of ask critical questions about like, well, what do we want our country to look like?
Speaker: We've spent the last five to six years blaming fake news, Russians.
Speaker: You know, Trump has been purportedly saying stop the steal.
Speaker: They've been searching, you know, conservatives believe there's a guy named Q in government.
Speaker: And it's made us really unable to deal with like basic governance right during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaker: This was really revealed.
Speaker: We couldn't get PPE to our people.
Speaker: We couldn't manufacture things we needed here.
Speaker: We didn't have universal health care.
Speaker: We had employee-based health care, which meant that, you know, if you lost your job, you lost your health care.
Speaker: So for all these reasons, you see all these problems with our country.
Speaker: And your point about coming back to 2016, I don't think 2016 is necessarily...
Speaker: you know, the most important year ever.
Speaker: But I do think we've never come to grips with what actually happened in 2016, right?
Speaker: That there was general frustration and anger.
Speaker: Some emerged in like a Bernie Sanders type economic left.
Speaker: Some emerged in like a right-wing populist, Donald Trump.
Speaker: And the status quo just basically, you know, kind of colluded to say like all of that anger is...
Speaker: poorly placed.
Speaker: You guys are uninformed.
Speaker: You should be listening to the media and us adults, whether we're the Lincoln Project from the right or the Democrats from the supposed left, we're going to come together.
Speaker: We're going to get rid of all the stuff online that tries to curtail our power.
Speaker: We're going to get rid of all those in popular culture who try and
Speaker: interrupted our power structure and the status quo.
Speaker: And that's basically where we've been at.
Speaker: But the people who are angry and been exploited and living difficult lives for the past 10, 20 years, their situation has not changed.
Speaker: It has not gotten better over that time, whether it's been Obama, Biden or Trump.
Speaker: You make a great point how misinformation and disinformation, it's kind of a pat answer to why things happen.
Speaker: And a lot of it was frustration and a backlash against the status quo.
Speaker: There was a big backlash of the Republican base against the Republican status quo.
Speaker: And trying to say that there's just one cause that led to this effect is almost always going to be wrong.
Speaker: And I think that right now we're suffering from that in the discussion a little bit.
Speaker: Different people define fake news differently.
Speaker: In the popular discussion, obviously, it often breaks down along partisan lines.
Speaker: First, Hillary Clinton said it to reference Facebook posts supporting Trump.
Speaker: Then, obviously, Trump turned it back and said, no, the mainstream media is fake news.
Speaker: CNN is fake news, et cetera.
Speaker: How do you define or think about fake news?
Speaker: And have you kind of run into any issues defining the term?
Speaker: I know definitions are hard.
Speaker: I mean, the definition part, I've run into trouble, but using fake news when I'm in my writing or in public talks, I've gotten some pushback.
Speaker: But first to define it, I define fake news as any false or misleading content that is presented as legitimate news or journalism.
Speaker: So that encompasses a wide range of differing content.
Speaker: And so in my book, The Anatomy of Fake News, and in my news literacy courses, we actually start off talking about like, what is news and what is journalism?
Speaker: So then we can get to what are examples of how you fake that, how you make other content look like news or journalism.
Speaker: As far as the pushback, though, you know, this speaks to kind of how polarized we are.
Speaker: A moment ago, you mentioned that, you know, there was a...
Speaker: aspect of the conservative movement that was pushing back against the Republican Party back in 2010, right?
Speaker: The Tea Party, which was also co-opted at some level, but there was some legitimate movement prior.
Speaker: News media, and Matt Taibbi has written brilliantly about this in Hate Inc.
Speaker: News media has really found a...
Speaker: The way to garner audiences is to make the audience feel like the good guy and create a character of the bad guy.
Speaker: This predates the 1990s.
Speaker: It's really Cold War programming, right?
Speaker: You make the Americans feel like the good guys, the Soviets and the Chinese and the Koreans and the Cubans.
Speaker: They're the bad guys.
Speaker: Well, when the Cold War ended or supposedly ended, you wouldn't know it from looking at media today.
Speaker: The now in the 1990s, a lot of these networks and outlets, especially like cable news and then online newspapers with like subscriber based models.
Speaker: They tell their audiences, you know, you are the good guy.
Speaker: So they find a smaller demographic of the audience, you know, Democrats of a certain age or Republicans of a certain age.
Speaker: You're the good guy.
Speaker: Your team's winning.
Speaker: Your team's righteous.
Speaker: You're doing all the good things, right?
Speaker: For the Democrats, you're
Speaker: You know, you're fighting for racial justice.
Speaker: You're fighting for same sex equality.
Speaker: You're fighting for women's rights and equality.
Speaker: And then Republicans, you're fighting for the family values.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, you're America first, all that nonsense.
Speaker: But it comes with another caveat, which is to make you feel like the good guy, you have to make the other side the bad guy.
Speaker: And this is where we create like these characters.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's why we hear these stories about how some people believe, you know, Democrats or liberals or pedophiles who are, you know,
Speaker: Training the next generation of pedophiles and they just want to not only support pro choice, but they love abortion and they want to see it happen 24 seven you know these kinds of like overblown hyperbolic characters.
Speaker: Demon rats.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: That term demon rats.
Speaker: Have you ever heard that?
Speaker: No, I've not.
Speaker: Oh my god.
Speaker: That's a really funny one.
Speaker: We should start a punk rock band called ourselves Demon Rats.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: And so you have these characters of each side, right?
Speaker: That's not really conducive to a democracy because, you know, you and I can disagree on policy and the right candidates and the right direction for the country.
Speaker: That's healthy democracy.
Speaker: We should have that debate, right?
Speaker: But when I think your existence is,
Speaker: threatens my way of life, then that makes democracy impossible and civil war inevitable.
Speaker: And that's that's kind of where our media system and our politicians are a part of that media system, which we can talk about as well, continue to feed that beast and really just divide us.
Speaker: And an issue like fake news is perfect because now
Speaker: If you say something that challenges my worldview or hurts my political project, I can just dismiss it as fake news.
Speaker: I don't really need to investigate it or defend my point.
Speaker: To your question earlier about this, I came to realize the power of this.
Speaker: I do a lot of publications, both public publications.
Speaker: I do like the scholarly publications,
Speaker: scholarly publications or the publications like nobody reads.
Speaker: But in that they do like review process.
Speaker: And every time in the review process, there's always at least one or multiple reviewers who are like, you shouldn't use fake news or you shouldn't use populism.
Speaker: It makes you sound like a Trumper.
Speaker: You should use a different word.
Speaker: I'm like, so we're just going to allow like your, you know, ideological enemy to take words that and so we're just not allowed to use them.
Speaker: Words have no meaning.
Speaker: But it speaks to that how kind of just divided we are that we can't even imagine a world where we would defend certain definitions or resist certain like persuasive propaganda from the other side.
Speaker: You're muted.
Speaker: Oh no!
Speaker: Two things that you said I want to hone in on because they're really interesting.
Speaker: You mentioned how people use fake news basically as an ad hominem attack.
Speaker: It's a type of rhetorical weapon, silencing the person you disagree with.
Speaker: Can you discuss a little more about why you call accusations of misinformation and disinformation a Trojan horse in some contexts?
Speaker: And what are they a Trojan horse for?
Speaker: They can be a treasure horse for many things.
Speaker: It depends on who's using it.
Speaker: But usually in a political context, political parties use it to centralize their own power and to minimize the power of the quote unquote other side.
Speaker: So when Donald Trump says you are fake news and he points at CNN, there's a part of me that's like, OK, yes, Donald, there's a lot of fake news that comes out of CNN and I've documented it.
Speaker: I'm happy to decide with you on that.
Speaker: But something tells me you're not calling them fake news the same way I am.
Speaker: You're calling them fake news because some of their reporting is accurate and legitimate and it is challenging your power.
Speaker: And that's the fake news.
Speaker: You have fake news in our quotes that you have a problem with.
Speaker: And so but for his for his base, when he was president, this worked perfectly.
Speaker: You know, studies showed that amongst Donald Trump voters, they trusted Trump.
Speaker: almost two and three times as much as they trusted the news media.
Speaker: So Trump was their truth in that sense.
Speaker: The same works on the other side, though, right?
Speaker: Like during the Trump years, MSNBC in particular would have a narrow characterization of all Trump voters.
Speaker: And they explained the whole Trump phenomenon based on Russia and Russiagate.
Speaker: And they had just this long series of baseless stories that they would perpetuate.
Speaker: And it worked to build their ratings.
Speaker: I mean, Rachel Maddow, you got to remember her.
Speaker: She was in like decline in viewership.
Speaker: There were there were whispers that she may lose her job at MSNBC in 2014.
Speaker: Then the Trump phenomenon hits.
Speaker: She's one of the highest watched people on television.
Speaker: She gets a 30 million dollar a year contract based off of that.
Speaker: But go back and look at the reporting.
Speaker: I mean, she's it's it's baseless and in some cases false, like the bounty on U.S. soldiers, the shutting down of the Vermont power plant, the infiltration of like the Bernie Sanders campaign, the P-tape.
Speaker: I mean, you could go on and on here about these like false and baseless stories that she spread.
Speaker: But it worked right.
Speaker: It worked in that case for her career.
Speaker: It worked for her political project, just like it worked for Donald Trump's career and his political project.
Speaker: There's also a lot of money involved now.
Speaker: So a lot of these like companies I talked about earlier, like NewsGuard and them.
Speaker: They have an ideological reason why they want to get rid of certain content.
Speaker: They also have economic interests and that if they become the education browser for students, there's a lot of money to be made from collecting and analyzing student data.
Speaker: So there's a multitude of reasons why people get into pretending that they are the truth teller when they're actually perpetuating falsehoods.
Speaker: At the Carp Lab, we do obviously a lot of work on character assassination.
Speaker: And one of the features of character assassination campaigns is that they use and abuse media to amplify and spread their attacks.
Speaker: So how do we watch out for that?
Speaker: What are the signs?
Speaker: Please share some wisdom with us.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: I mean, you know, you had a
Speaker: If you had a functioning free press, a lot of this work would be done for you.
Speaker: I'm not a big fan of depending on anybody to do the work for you.
Speaker: I think democracy is a 24 hour a day job.
Speaker: If you don't want to work 24 hours a day on your democracy, you're in luck.
Speaker: There's a lot of authoritarian regimes who are looking for new docile bodies to be their subjects.
Speaker: But in terms of what you can do, you really have to examine your media diet.
Speaker: You may have to have one of those, for lack of a better term, like come to Jesus moments.
Speaker: You can't follow every story all the time.
Speaker: You can't be outraged about every single thing all the time.
Speaker: You're going to have to really value quality over quantity.
Speaker: And I encourage people to spend less time aligning themselves with media outlets and more time identifying journalists who do great journalism.
Speaker: So people are, you know, you got to defend the New York Times.
Speaker: Well, like who at the New York Times?
Speaker: You know, which reporters, which journalists?
Speaker: That's a big distinction to make, too.
Speaker: Is this a journalist?
Speaker: Is this a reporter?
Speaker: Is this a pundit?
Speaker: I think for the most parts, you can cut pundits out of your diet, especially in legacy media.
Speaker: Reporters can be good if it's something that just happened now.
Speaker: Reporters, you know, they usually give you just a timeline of events.
Speaker: You know, we know the president was here.
Speaker: We know this was said then.
Speaker: We know this report came up then.
Speaker: Journalists, though, are really who you want to follow.
Speaker: Those are the people who do the in-depth investigative work to get a multitude of sources on the record to paint a pretty well substantiated picture or story of what occurred, depending on the topic.
Speaker: So make sure you're gravitating toward journalists versus pundits or reporters.
Speaker: That's step one.
Speaker: You know, look at their track record and the track record of the outlet they work at.
Speaker: Credibility is the key to the game if you're in news media.
Speaker: Well, it should be.
Speaker: Not in today's news media, but it should be.
Speaker: You know, does this news outlet have credibility or has it gotten, you know, stories wrong?
Speaker: Has this journalist made stories wrong?
Speaker: Do either of them have a conflict of interest?
Speaker: If Washington Post is reporting on Amazon with Jeff Bezos owning Washington Post, I'm skeptical immediately, right?
Speaker: It's not just economic interest.
Speaker: It can be political interest as well.
Speaker: You know, CNN and MSNBC really lean hard into Democratic Party audiences.
Speaker: So if they start reporting negatively on the Republicans, be a little skeptical.
Speaker: Same thing with Fox News and New York Post go after the Democrats.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Be a little skeptical.
Speaker: And then what is always hold these people accountable.
Speaker: So figure out who they are.
Speaker: You know, what is their identity in terms of class, race, gender, region, ideology?
Speaker: How might that affect their reporting?
Speaker: Do their sources come from a diversity of backgrounds or not?
Speaker: Who are their sources?
Speaker: Their sources have conflicts of interest.
Speaker: This is a lot of work to think about who's missing, what is there and is what is there legitimate.
Speaker: Be weary of anonymous sources.
Speaker: We've gotten way too comfortable with anonymous sources in this culture.
Speaker: Washington Post, they allowed like, I think it was Washington Post, allowed an anonymous source to write an op-ed and then an anonymous source wrote a book.
Speaker: I call me crazy, but I won't read a book by someone I don't know who it is.
Speaker: Anyways, so the way to kind of wrap that up, though, you talk about like the Steele dossier.
Speaker: I was skeptical from day one about the whole Russia thing.
Speaker: So I'm like, it's intelligence sources who are anonymous.
Speaker: I know the intelligence community has lied since its existence.
Speaker: Well documented, including in my book and tons of others.
Speaker: And then the other source was the Steele dossier, which was by British intelligence and Christopher Steele, who wrote it, said that a lot of it was just rumors and it couldn't be substantiated.
Speaker: And I knew Republican opposition in the primaries had helped create part of it.
Speaker: And then Democratic Party funding had helped create part of it in the general election.
Speaker: So already I know it's like political propaganda.
Speaker: It's based on unsubstantiated claims.
Speaker: But if you listen to the news media,
Speaker: It was used as a source of facts for all these, what turned out to be baseless stories.
Speaker: I do need to throw one curveball in here with the Steele dossier, I think it's fair to say.
Speaker: Things like that are written in every single political campaign ever.
Speaker: always have existed.
Speaker: What was really unique about the Steele dossier, though, is BuzzFeed made the historic decision to publish it online.
Speaker: Usually most journalistic outlets will verify pieces of something and then bring it.
Speaker: In the case of the Steele dossier, it was all online and users were talking about it.
Speaker: So there was kind of this weird...
Speaker: Users are popularizing these baseless stories and then news media was legitimizing them in real time.
Speaker: And we lost the ability to kind of verify a lot of this stuff.
Speaker: It was already treated as if it was true before there was a verification process, which made it a really interesting case study in fake news and the ways in which communications travel in the digital age.
Speaker: We've discussed a lot about disinformation and misinformation from legacy media sources, which I really like.
Speaker: I like that we kind of flipped the conversation maybe on its head to discuss that first.
Speaker: So now I want to go into what
Speaker: I think a lot of people think about when they think about disinformation, which are things like QAnon or dumb internet rumors even.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be political.
Speaker: It can just be bad junk information, you know, eat 12 almonds a day and you'll lose 10 pounds kind of information.
Speaker: Do you think there's any way to decrease the volume of junk without enabling censorship of alternative perspectives?
Speaker: Is it all just being more aware or is there any way we can try to decrease the amount of junk information at the source in your mind in a way that wouldn't hurt freedom of speech or intellectual freedom or press freedom?
Speaker: Yeah, I think there is a way.
Speaker: And I know we have spent most of this interview talking about legacy corporate media, fake news.
Speaker: And you're right.
Speaker: And a lot of my early research, actually, I started my early research on Alex Jones.
Speaker: So complaining that Alex Jones' lives were making their way into legacy media.
Speaker: But yeah, folks like Alex Jones and Breitbart, and you'd have to throw in Matt Drudge, who really, I think, was the first one to really understand the potential for these tools as political propaganda.
Speaker: Anyways, yeah, you have this false content, which exists online.
Speaker: But you really need to go back to the 1990s.
Speaker: The tools themselves don't do anything wrong.
Speaker: Just because we have the internet doesn't mean we need to be inundated with the tsunami of false information.
Speaker: there was certain legislation and laws that were passed that shaped the ways in which the internet operated.
Speaker: And from that, within that operation or that shape, companies emerged to design platforms that adhered to what the rules were on the internet.
Speaker: And now those platforms, and I'm talking about social media, I'm talking about the search engines, they are able to operate in a way that we're finding out is pretty threatening to a democracy in a lot of ways.
Speaker: And so go back to the 1990s, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, for example, that didn't have to be passed.
Speaker: If it wasn't, it'd be very consequential.
Speaker: Maybe you would have less tech billionaires or would have taken longer to become a tech billionaire, but you'd have platforms that were more concerned, legally speaking, about whether or not there was false information on their platform, right?
Speaker: They wouldn't want to get sued.
Speaker: Right now they don't have that.
Speaker: So this stuff can spread.
Speaker: Maybe you could give more protections to users to call out false information, things like that.
Speaker: I think really, though, it has to be up to the platforms that are allowing this stuff.
Speaker: So the thing about fake news, and this is really difficult when we talk about our ideological enemies because they say such...
Speaker: Horrendous things.
Speaker: But you have to remember that fake news can make otherwise good people do and say horrible things.
Speaker: That is, you know, if you really believe that the Democrats are demons who stole an election and who are undermining democracy,
Speaker: If you go rush the Capitol, and that was true, which it was not, they absolutely are not demons, they did not steal the election, I'm not entertaining that, but let's say for the sake of argument that was true.
Speaker: If you storm the Capitol, you would be a hero to democracy, right?
Speaker: You would be standing up for our democracy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So when you're living in that illusion, the power of that illusion is such it gets you to do these horrible things where we had this poor woman was killed because she thought she was defending democracy when really she was not.
Speaker: And so we have to sort of keep that in mind that we want these platforms to operate in a way where we do have access to information.
Speaker: We're always going to come across false information.
Speaker: We're always going to be misled.
Speaker: We're humans at some level.
Speaker: But the ways in which the...
Speaker: political economy of the internet has been designed, it actually incentivizes this false information.
Speaker: You know, getting people on their screen longer so they can provide more data that can be then analyzed and that analysis can then be sold to those who want to use it is the political economy of the internet.
Speaker: As long as you have that fear, hate, division, those are going to be the things that sell.
Speaker: Informing people, bringing communities together, serving democracy.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: That's what I do as a career, but it ain't profitable.
Speaker: And so these companies are not going to serve that unless we change the political economy of the Internet.
Speaker: And I think that has to be done at a governmental level versus targeting this supposed bad actor or that one.
Speaker: I like how you mentioned that fake news has these really negative effects for the overall environment, the overall culture, the country, the world even, if we want to go super macro, but it's also bad for individual people.
Speaker: And I always think about the Comet ping pong pizzeria guy, the guy who went
Speaker: And for any listeners who might not have heard about this one, there was a guy who he believed that at a certain pizzeria, which is on the outside of, kind of on the outskirts of DC as you're going into Arlington, because he had read different QAnon message boards, he believed that this pizzeria was being used, I believe, by John Podesta, the Democratic strategist, as a pedophile, like the center of his pedophile ring, and that there was a basement of this pizza parlor and...
Speaker: in it where kids were being held and kidnapped against their will and abused.
Speaker: And because he wanted to save the kids, he got his gun and he drove up to DC and he went into Comet Ping Pong and he fired a shot.
Speaker: Thank goodness he didn't hurt anyone.
Speaker: and he was very upset when he realized there was no basement to the pizza parlor and he said one of the things that I always stuck with me was I think I got some bad intel on this one or something along those lines and every time I think about that I just I feel sad I feel sad about
Speaker: that people's good impulses can be hijacked by bad actors and things that are, you know, good about us as humans.
Speaker: The fact that we want to protect people, that we want to protect our country, our family, we want to protect other people's kids that we don't even know anything about just because we feel so strongly for them.
Speaker: It makes me sad the way that these positive aspects get twisted and get misused.
Speaker: I think you're spot on, and that's a prime example, because he was a father in his 30s, and as I recall, he had just gotten internet into his home shortly before that.
Speaker: And so, again, there's a father, and the story is totally not real, and I always have to say this, I don't entertain these stories at all, but if the story was real, which it was not, again, this guy would have liberated supposedly countless children, but it's also a case for
Speaker: media literacy because he read these horrific stories about how these emails, the emails themselves, a batch of emails was real.
Speaker: But what was claimed to be in the emails was like totally false.
Speaker: I mean, like people quoted like the word pedophilia and things like that in their posts about the emails, but those words never actually appeared in the email.
Speaker: So this was like a basic media literacy lesson that this individual could have used to avoid this.
Speaker: But still he went in and shot these things up.
Speaker: And so those stories, I think,
Speaker: We often misread as an opportunity to laugh at the, you know, the idiot who read the story and then used violence.
Speaker: But I think it would be more constructive as a culture to read those stories about like, you know, is,
Speaker: how sad we can feel for this individual and the terror and feel sad for the people who lived in his terror.
Speaker: But also like, what can we do?
Speaker: I mean, how do we prevent this?
Speaker: How do we make sure the next person like that has the media literacy skills to sort of write back to that post and be like, hey, I went through the emails and none of this appears in it.
Speaker: I'm not sure what we're talking about on this blog and stuff like that.
Speaker: I think that would be a more constructive way to use a tragedy like that than sort of just mock this individual or others like him.
Speaker: I think that encouraging that kind of empathy, divorcing it from whatever the current partisan political fights are, in some ways that's, I hope, something that more media literacy and more awareness of how our emotions and the group dynamics, the us versus them, get used against us and that people want us to feel that hatred.
Speaker: and that contempt for people on the other side.
Speaker: Maybe that could make people slow down and say, hey, why am I reacting in the way I am?
Speaker: It's a great point.
Speaker: And one of the things I didn't anticipate when I wrote The Anatomy of Fake News was the amount of emails I would get from people who read the book or heard me in an interview or whatever.
Speaker: And they'll share some personal story of someone they've lost in their lives, either lost in terms of relationship or lost in terms of some case their actual life, because they went down some fake news path.
Speaker: You know, I've got, especially during COVID, I got so many emails of folks who told me I've lost an aunt who thought it was a
Speaker: hoax and, you know, refuse to ventilate her and I can't believe I lost her.
Speaker: I could never connect her at the end.
Speaker: It affects so many lives on that level.
Speaker: So I think to your point, it's
Speaker: We should think less about how it's a problem on the other side and think about how it's a problem for all of us.
Speaker: And I think that would be a more constructive kind of starting point because it does affect us at different levels.
Speaker: It's not just the I know the media wants to put us into the Dems versus Republicans game, but it affects us in so many ways beyond that, that I think people find way more important.
Speaker: I think that that humanistic approach is really important and it's something that gets lost.
Speaker: Going back to what you said at the very beginning when you were discussing critical and acritical media literacy and you said there's the arts education people that just want to teach people how do you make media and how do you consume it and what's beautiful and good about it.
Speaker: I find myself leaning in that direction sometimes.
Speaker: Sometimes I just want everyone, you know, I feel like that at the end of Mean Girls when the one character stands up and she says, I just want everyone to love each other and have cake made of unicorns and roses or whatever she says.
Speaker: I'm just...
Speaker: you want to yell like can't you just be nice do you uh do you find this i i think mean girls is probably the most often cited movie in like communication classes i don't know what it is someone always brings up me that's so that's so funny i i mean i think it's just cited uh generally but
Speaker: it's probably like up there with like Harry Potter as one of the most um cited or analogized two things so hopefully I know people get really annoyed if anyone compares anything to Harry Potter now because they think it's so out of date like can't did can't you read another book I've heard that one um so maybe it'll be soon with Mean Girls can't you watch another movie good point good point
Speaker: So on a totally unrelated note, more unrelated to what you were talking about versus my tangent.
Speaker: I thought of this because first you mentioned Alex Jones and how you started writing on Alex Jones.
Speaker: And then you were talking about how the internet doesn't have to be like this and how the structure of the internet and the culture we have now is a
Speaker: result of conscious choices that people decided to make.
Speaker: And it reminded me, I wanted to bring this up because I wanted to commend it to any listeners.
Speaker: There's a podcast by the writer John Ronson called Things Fall Apart.
Speaker: And there he is a great episode where he discusses, I believe it was at Stanford.
Speaker: I don't quote me on that.
Speaker: But it was at a large American university.
Speaker: And it was about the small group of people that made a decision about what they would allow on their very early listserv.
Speaker: And they made a decision towards we need to allow people.
Speaker: as much as possible because they kind of had this techno-utopian libertarian view that letting a thousand flowers bloom is going to be the direction that the internet's going to go and it's interesting how those decisions they still reverberate to this day and
Speaker: I don't know, maybe that is kind of part of the critical perspective, looking at how things aren't just this way.
Speaker: It's not just inevitable.
Speaker: Things are a result of the actual decisions that people make.
Speaker: There's not really much of a question there.
Speaker: I just wanted to share that.
Speaker: But I don't know.
Speaker: Feel free to chime in.
Speaker: I'm sure you have a related insight.
Speaker: Well, nothing more than just echoing what you said.
Speaker: I think reiterating that point over and over again is a way to give folks hope.
Speaker: you know, one of the most frustrating parts is having a conversation like we have had here today.
Speaker: And at the end, someone's like, yeah, but it's not going to change.
Speaker: You know, the Internet's always been this way or whatever.
Speaker: It doesn't it doesn't need to be.
Speaker: Things feel like they can't change until they do.
Speaker: And the story of history is humans like finding ways to build movements to pressure institutions of power to make the changes that they demand.
Speaker: And there's plenty of visions for what an internet could look like that could better serve the people.
Speaker: I mean, I'll give a shout out to Christian Fuchs, his book, Social Media, and his work on digital culture, I think.
Speaker: It gives us a lot of ideas for what would a more inclusive, collaborative approach to the internet look like, one that's meant to serve humans more so than the current version.
Speaker: I also think we talk a lot about fake news, and I think it's become a major topic because it disrupts a lot of, you know, some of the most like privileged people in our society, right?
Speaker: Those in power frustrated that their power is being challenged by fake news.
Speaker: But there's so many other issues and problems with the Internet.
Speaker: I mentioned earlier the way the algorithms reinforce racism and sexism.
Speaker: how digital tools are being used like police departments to reinforce racial inequities.
Speaker: The class inequities, these people who work behind the screen that have to determine the veracity of content or whether or not content can be on a platform.
Speaker: So they're looking at
Speaker: pornography and abuse and murder photos and videos all day, every day for usually a few cents on the minute, just so they can say whether or not it should be allowed in the platform.
Speaker: The companies tell us algorithms do that, but people do a lot of that work.
Speaker: Sarah Roberts has done some great work on that.
Speaker: And there's a book called Ghost Work.
Speaker: That's great on that as well.
Speaker: And then, of course, one of the things I like to point out in the critical classroom, I think this speaks to your question.
Speaker: The whole idea that we are users kind of mask the idea that we're actually the product and the idea that it's free distraction.
Speaker: The fact that we work 24 seven on social media, giving up our time, giving up our labor, giving up our data, giving up our privacy.
Speaker: So a handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley can profit and those who can afford to weaponize the analysis from those algorithms can utilize them for industry or politics or whatever it may be.
Speaker: So I think having that understanding of what the internet actually is then can open up discussions about, well, what would you want it to look like?
Speaker: What would you want the internet to do?
Speaker: What of these aspects would you change or eradicate?
Speaker: I think having that awareness is really important and I wanted to hone in on one thing you said when you were discussing the moderation work and how awful and grueling that work is and it is like ghost work.
Speaker: People I believe a lot in the Philippines, I remember reading an article, are paid horribly low wages to look at the worst stuff you could imagine and decide whether we can see it or not and
Speaker: That's another thing where you can apply critical methods like who is being exploited something about the digital world.
Speaker: It seems so clean Maybe it's because of the you know how technology looks or just the interfaces You don't think that there's all this machinery behind the scenes and it's not just machinery It's people and people's labor is being exploited to develop that very clean bloodless interface
Speaker: That also reminded me of when earlier you were talking about how the platforms, you know, right now they put out a certain political
Speaker: view and they will then behind the scenes be working with the other side in another eight years and they go back and forth and it reminded me there was a recent article I read about American Express and American Express under some pressure had pulled the use of their payment processor to access pornography websites
Speaker: after there had been an article by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times exposing some horrific things that were being hosted on such websites that the websites refused to pull down.
Speaker: Or they would pull them down but not effectively, essentially.
Speaker: And again, why were they allowed to be up in the first place, etc.
Speaker: American Express put it back a couple months later.
Speaker: They again allowed them to use American Express cards just when people's attention was turned somewhere else.
Speaker: And I think that's a good example of how performative and meaningless, how how meaningless all of this outrage is.
Speaker: You feel like, oh, we really won something.
Speaker: You know, we created this big scandal
Speaker: and the news and there was so much outrage and so much pressure and now American Express is pulled from these websites.
Speaker: Nah, they just went back up in a couple of months.
Speaker: We live in an age of like corporate virtue signaling.
Speaker: I mean, it's disgusting at some levels.
Speaker: Like I remember Amazon had the Black Lives Matter banner up on their website.
Speaker: And at the same time, they were trying to fire African-American Christopher Smalls, who was trying to organize a labor union in, I believe, New York.
Speaker: You know, just that sort of just hypocritical co-optation of like legitimate frustrations from the streets.
Speaker: But your question a moment ago about
Speaker: People were asking, why would this website allow these videos up in the first place?
Speaker: It really reveals something that I think people are starting to grasp, which is there's so much vapid bluster from Silicon Valley.
Speaker: That is, they make all these giant promises.
Speaker: We're a new industry.
Speaker: We can do amazing things.
Speaker: We can deliver democracy.
Speaker: Mark Zuckerberg, right?
Speaker: We can make a whole bio lab in a box.
Speaker: That was Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker: You know, we can remove said content.
Speaker: We can find hate speech.
Speaker: It's all, you know, lies.
Speaker: They never deliver on these promises, but these big promises bring in investors.
Speaker: They attract users.
Speaker: And then they're always playing the PR game to try and cover it up, right?
Speaker: They have these huge like PR wings that try and establish themselves.
Speaker: It's like, oh, fun people I'd like to hang out with.
Speaker: Isn't this like an average person?
Speaker: You know, when really they're just rapacious capitalists.
Speaker: who are overselling their product.
Speaker: I mean, they sell themselves as like these genius inventors, but
Speaker: the main features of this whole industry, like I mentioned earlier, like GPS or touchscreen or the internet itself or Siri, these were all developed with public money, you know, or even some of the features of like Tesla and things like that.
Speaker: You know, usually this is stealing work from like graduate students with public loans and then putting it under like the Tesla brand or something like that.
Speaker: So it's a whole industry that's built on lies, like so many industries of the past.
Speaker: And I think the public is starting to realize like,
Speaker: oh, they make these promises that seem impossible.
Speaker: Maybe that's because they are impossible.
Speaker: The industry can't deliver on these things.
Speaker: So we're kind of ending on a little bit of a morose note there.
Speaker: Even though I think we were hopeful, just like 10 minutes ago, our discussion was super hopeful.
Speaker: And then we got really down in the dumps with exploitation and lies from big tech.
Speaker: So what I want to do is go on a positive note.
Speaker: I love to end interviews with some practical takeaways that will benefit people in their everyday lives.
Speaker: And we already discussed some things you can do if you're trying to see is something fake news or real news and how to be a thoughtful and critical news consumer.
Speaker: However, in the interpersonal context,
Speaker: What are some strategies when you're having a conversation about whatever the latest culture war or hot button topic is with someone in your family?
Speaker: Or maybe you're having a conversation with someone who believes some piece of misinformation or disinformation.
Speaker: You're trying to figure out how to engage with them in a way that's hopefully persuasive, but also respectful and productive, even if you can't persuade them right now.
Speaker: have you identified any strategies in your work that help have these difficult conversations?
Speaker: Yeah, and let's agree to disagree.
Speaker: This is what we focus on in the text, myself and
Speaker: Nicky Hough.
Speaker: And I'll say just real quick, I'll say just a moment ago when you were talking about we were on a high note, went lower.
Speaker: I was raised in an Irish Catholic family.
Speaker: So pessimism, it's in the DNA.
Speaker: But that aside, and let's agree to disagree.
Speaker: Nicky Hough and I, we talked about this exact question, you know, after I wrote the Anatomy of Fake News and he had worked on Project Censored.
Speaker: We'd go on book tours and constantly people would ask us like, OK, we get it.
Speaker: We get what fake news is.
Speaker: We get how to spot it.
Speaker: We get it's a problem.
Speaker: But what do I do about my aunt or what do I do about my friend?
Speaker: You know, this person says this crazy stuff.
Speaker: And what I like to tell people is kind of the first thing I like things to reflect upon is what not to do.
Speaker: If you think you're going to change their mind and they're going to submit until you're right in one conversation, you're going out on a fool's errand.
Speaker: You're wasting your time and theirs.
Speaker: If you think you can lampoon them, chide them, embarrass them into agreeing with you, again, fool's errand and you're probably exacerbating the problem.
Speaker: You want to make the conflict constructive, not destructive.
Speaker: So you don't want to cancel them.
Speaker: You don't want to shame them, name call them.
Speaker: You want to be constructive and that necessitates reciprocity.
Speaker: You have to get this person who's comfortable listening and entering in the dialogical with you and you're comfortable with them.
Speaker: So this does not mean you need to put up with hate or racist comments or anything like that.
Speaker: That would not be reciprocal.
Speaker: But if you can get in a space where you can communicate, then it really is incumbent upon you to start listening.
Speaker: So what is it that they're exactly claiming or arguing?
Speaker: And what evidence is it that they have?
Speaker: And once they've said their piece,
Speaker: Repeat what they said in your words to make sure that you actually understand what they're saying.
Speaker: Give them the chance to say, oh, no, no, no, you heard it like this.
Speaker: I didn't mean that.
Speaker: Once you have an understanding of what they said, then I encourage you to play the question game.
Speaker: like, hey, I was unfamiliar with that evidence.
Speaker: Have you read this?
Speaker: Or, you know, one time I can't remember where it was, but I was reading this and it seemed to disagree with you.
Speaker: Have you read that?
Speaker: Or what do you say to that?
Speaker: So engage folks on some intellectual level where you're really there to understand.
Speaker: I don't mean hear, I mean, listen.
Speaker: So don't just wait till they're done and then start talking.
Speaker: Actually listen with the intent to understand.
Speaker: That's why you repeat what they say before you get into asking questions.
Speaker: There's a lot of research on this.
Speaker: And the reason why you go through the sources with them is it necessitates critical media literacy.
Speaker: A lot of our sources come from media.
Speaker: And I don't just mean news media.
Speaker: I mean, people cite film.
Speaker: Earlier, we were talking about Mean Girls, right?
Speaker: The fact that we both knew what Mean Girls was and the context in which you were using was very helpful for moving our discussion along.
Speaker: If I hadn't seen it and you were citing it, we would have to do a lot of explaining before we could understand each other, right?
Speaker: It's just you have to take the time to do that.
Speaker: Now, I know some people will hear this and they'll say, here's another white guy, academic writer who's oozing with privilege, telling me that I need to spend more time in dialogue with people.
Speaker: Has he ever been in my situation?
Speaker: Part of what we did in the book intentionally was to find people who did not share the same identity as us, who don't just talk about this work, but actually do it.
Speaker: So we talk about folks like Daryl Davis, who's famous African-American man who engages
Speaker: Ku Klux Klan members in conversation and uses dialogue, usually centered around music, to get them to leave the Klan.
Speaker: We do sports stars like Malcolm Jenkins.
Speaker: We have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they're talking about restorative justice.
Speaker: We have trans activists who do canvassing efforts around elections who do the same work.
Speaker: So the point we make in the book is there's a lot of theoretical, there's a lot of scholarship that I think people should familiarize themselves with and use and know.
Speaker: But there's also a lot of activists and real, quote unquote, real people, as if us scholars aren't real people, real people on the ground who are doing this work.
Speaker: And it's producing positive results.
Speaker: And so there is, in this midst of darkness around fake news and what seems like the upcoming Civil War, people claim that almost two-thirds of Americans think a Civil War is going to happen in their lifetime.
Speaker: Hopefully, hopefully they know you're probably not gonna access social media so that'll turn most people off.
Speaker: But anyways, in the midst of all that darkness, there is light that we try and bring about in this text there is something we can do about this if we all work hard to make an effort and I and I know.
Speaker: Some people I've heard from people sometimes say well I'm just tired of I'm tired of dealing with this entire I don't want to go do all this I shouldn't have to.
Speaker: Again, bad news.
Speaker: You live in a democracy.
Speaker: It's a 24-hour-a-day job.
Speaker: One of my most favorite Americans ever that this country ever produced is Frederick Douglass.
Speaker: I'm sure he was very tired when he was a slave learning to read in secret.
Speaker: I'm sure he was very tired when he beat up his slave breaker.
Speaker: I'm sure he was very tired when he escaped slavery.
Speaker: I'm sure he was very tired when he gave anti-slave speeches while he was escaped and almost got murdered multiple times.
Speaker: I'm sure he was tired when he sent his kids off to fight in the Civil War and almost died.
Speaker: And I'm sure he was tired during Reconstruction when he was fighting the re-rise of white supremacy.
Speaker: But until I do even a fraction of the amount of work he did, I'm not going to complain about being tired.
Speaker: And I think most Americans would be wise to take that same approach.
Speaker: I'm trying to not say I really agree with you because I keep saying that and it's because it's true.
Speaker: I really agree with you.
Speaker: I second everything you said.
Speaker: On my part, I guess I want to share a personal experience, why it is so important to have those kind of dialogic conversations
Speaker: And it is hard.
Speaker: I've had this experience.
Speaker: I was talking to someone and she genuinely believed in the Freemason conspiracy theory.
Speaker: She believed all this stuff about the Illuminati and I got so frustrated.
Speaker: I was so annoyed.
Speaker: I was just like, the Freemasons, I just was trying to explain like the Freemasons are a social gatherer.
Speaker: Like they're not a conspiracy.
Speaker: and i think that when you're in that conversation with someone it feels like there's this barrier you can't break through and it's like it it dials up the frustration and the tension to this level where you are just it feels like you're talking to a brick wall and i think it's like maybe just practice maybe if we just practice our dialogue skills and we
Speaker: you know, practice makes perfect and eventually we'll become better listeners.
Speaker: Like, I hope that's how it works.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And better, better listening skills for sure could help.
Speaker: And also knowing the limits or the context of the conversation.
Speaker: So, you know, we spent quite a fair amount of time in today's interview talking about how social media kind of
Speaker: limits what's possible in terms of conversation, right?
Speaker: I would argue that whatever issue you're really passionate about, say you're really passionate about convincing people that we need to combat climate change, or you're really passionate about gun rights, gun control, whatever you want to, however you want to frame it.
Speaker: I don't think social media is a platform that's conducive to giving those issues the respect they deserve in a constructive manner.
Speaker: And so maybe spend less time getting outraged at, you know, your racist high school mate on Twitter and more time seeing who you can engage, who holds these racist attitudes in a one-on-one in-person level and try and disentangle them from them.
Speaker: And to your point about getting frustrated, yeah, it's very frustrating.
Speaker: I don't want to sit here and act like I'm some passive California lefty who just goes through each conversation and I'm totally chill about it.
Speaker: No, I get frustrated all the time.
Speaker: But having some sense of idea that you're going to screw up, being able to own when you do screw up, because we all are going to screw up.
Speaker: I screw up all the time.
Speaker: I'm very sarcastic.
Speaker: That oftentimes is not conducive to constructive dialogue, something I need to remind myself about.
Speaker: So so so knowing those kinds of limits, I think, is really, really important.
Speaker: But also know that sometimes you can just plant seeds.
Speaker: So if you you know someone does post something insane about the Freemasons, just simply asking a question of like, you know, I haven't heard that.
Speaker: Where is the evidence for that?
Speaker: I'm sure they'll eat you alive and they'll attack you personally, but maybe you've planted to see them next time they go to post something like I should definitely look this up or hyperlink this before I post it and maybe they'll find out that hyperlink doesn't exist.
Speaker: So they shouldn't post that.
Speaker: So little things like that can be can be helpful in the long run, even though you may not immediately see the fruits of your labor.
Speaker: It's a great thing to keep in mind and I have to say in this conversation you've definitely been a chill California lefty because you've let me keep you for so long.
Speaker: I just looked at the clock.
Speaker: I'm like geez, I can't believe we've been talking for this long.
Speaker: It's a testament to you and your awesome answers that we went this long.
Speaker: So I'm going to try to wrap it up and not keep you for the rest of the day.
Speaker: I got one thing that I like to wrap up on.
Speaker: What is something that you've read or watched that you would recommend to a listener of this show?
Speaker: And I was going to say to try to better understand our media ecosystem.
Speaker: But actually, just on any topic we discussed, like it could be about how you engage people from the other side, quote unquote, or how you how you engage in dialogue or maybe something about our media.
Speaker: Or maybe something about big tech.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Just what would be something really worthwhile that you would commend to our listeners?
Speaker: I'm a total fanboy for Brianna Joy Gray.
Speaker: The Bad Faith podcast, the work that she's doing over there, I think is just phenomenal.
Speaker: She's a
Speaker: She's a brilliant, vibrant young person.
Speaker: And she has just a great charisma to her.
Speaker: She could use that to preach to the choir to lefties.
Speaker: But instead, she uses an opportunity to have difficult conversations with people she disagrees with.
Speaker: And she gives them and they reciprocate total respect.
Speaker: And it's a really interesting place to sit down and just...
Speaker: hear substantive conversation about key issues from people who absolutely disagree in a very respectful way and I think there's a lot we could take from that space and model that behavior so I highly recommend and by the way I don't know Brianna so this isn't like a personal thing I'm not connected this is just as an outsider fanboy I think Bad Faith Podcast with Brianna Joy Gray would be something I'd highly recommend for sure
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: Well, I'll add that to the list of all the other sources you mentioned today.
Speaker: And to all the listeners, I'm going to link them all down below in the description so you can get easy access to everything that Dr. Higdon mentioned.
Speaker: I want to thank you so much.
Speaker: We had such a great conversation.
Speaker: Again, it moved so fast that I didn't realize how long we were talking.
Speaker: And if our listeners finish up the episode, they're like, this wasn't long enough.
Speaker: I want more Dr. Nolan Higdon immediately.
Speaker: Can you tell us where we find you as well as if there are any new projects in the works that we should be looking out for?
Speaker: Yeah, the new projects in the work.
Speaker: I have a ton.
Speaker: I'm a workaholic.
Speaker: That's one of those colonial legacies I'm stuck with.
Speaker: I work all the time.
Speaker: I'm a co-organizer of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, which is in Oakland, California, October 21st.
Speaker: And I'm sorry, October 21 to 23.
Speaker: And you could that's in person or you can watch hybrid.
Speaker: If you want to present hybrid, you can still apply through late August.
Speaker: And then I'm doing an edited volume on global censorship with Robin Anderson and Steve Masick.
Speaker: And I'm working on being a co-editor on two journals and one edited volume for Routledge on critical media literacy scholars.
Speaker: And then I always keep a lot of op-eds in the work.
Speaker: I'm playing around with this idea of how...
Speaker: Now it's okay to be ageist against Biden because a lot of Democrats are circling the wagons to take over the presidency.
Speaker: So you couldn't be ageist against him in 2020, but in 2024, they're trying to make it okay.
Speaker: So Buttigieg and Harris and Newsom and others can run, but I don't know.
Speaker: We'll see if I write on that.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So that's kind of what I'm working on right now.
Speaker: If you want to follow me, follow me on Twitter.
Speaker: I'm at Nolan underscore Higdon.
Speaker: Please follow me.
Speaker: I'll follow you back.
Speaker: I promise.
Speaker: unless I forget.
Speaker: And you can also find my work at projectcenter.org.
Speaker: I do a lot of work with Project Centered.
Speaker: And then I just want to say it's been a great conversation.
Speaker: to have with you as well.
Speaker: I concur that it flew by so quickly.
Speaker: And this is just really a great program.
Speaker: I enjoyed listening to some of the episodes when I first got introduced to it a couple months ago.
Speaker: And it's been a pleasure to be here and talk.
Speaker: You're an excellent host.
Speaker: And I really hope to come back.
Speaker: And I hope people will keep tuning in and share the program with their friends and colleagues and networks.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much.
Speaker: And I want you back and everyone else I'm sure who's going to listen to this and at the CARP Lab, I know, will want you back too.
Speaker: So thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of CARP Radio.
Speaker: If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave us a five-star rating, and share it with your friends and family.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
