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Civil Discourse in a Polarized Society Discussion

Last week we hosted an event in our TV studio called Civil Discourse in a Polarized Society. It was the culmination of a partnership with Gulfshore Life Magazine where we explored how we’ve gotten to the place in our society where talking about difficult issues is practically impossible.

About 100 people turned out for the discussion, led by Dr. Christopher Phillips, author of Socrates Café and Constitution Café, as well as a decades long advocate for civil dialogue. We streamed the event live on Facebook, and you can still watch it there in its entirety, but today we’re going to play a portion of it to give our listeners a sense of what was discussed.

 

 

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.