Journalist Lucas Daprile interviewed CEHV Director Piers Turner about the importance of civil discourse in today's political environment for a new series from cleveland.com. Read all three articles:

• Partisan rancor is tearing our country apart. Let’s change that: Civil Discourse Initiative
   
• Who killed civility? Northeast Ohioans blame Trump, Biden and media. But history points to someone else: Civil Discourse Initiative
   
• We weren’t always this divided. How can we fix it? Civil discourse initiative

In the first article, Turner helped to clarify the challenge:  "It’s not disagreement that’s the problem. It’s how we disagree that can be the problem." He noted that, in collaboration with students at Ohio State, CEHV has developed a set of virtues called the "4Cs" -- Be Curious, Be Charitable, Be Conscientious, and Be Constructive -- needed for civil discourse. 

In the second article, Turner pointed out structural factors that often undermine civil discourse: "A lot of Americans across this divide are feeling insecure economically. To me that creates conditions where people retreat to their corners, and this is all stoked by a media environment where talking heads on cable news are incentivized to increase conflict, and social media puts people into their informational in-group bubbles and (this) brings out the worst in people." 

In the final piece, suggested a path forward: "There are ground rules that we can all embrace that allow our conversations to be robust and rigorous, and still allow us to respect each other at the end of the day and not feel like the other person is just trying to score points and take us down."

Please visit us for more information about the "4Cs" of civil discourse and our Civil Discourse for Citizenship program.