Is Fake News Really a Thing?

Featured Guests:

Cindy Barth - Editor, Orlando Business Journal

Grant Heston - Chief of Staff and Vice President for Communications & Marketing, UCF

Rick Brunson - Associate Instructor, UCF Nicholson School of Communication & Media

Episode Transcription:

Paul Jarley:                         It makes you believe there's no such thing as truth.

Grant Heston:                   There's a lot of things labeled fake news that people just don't like.

Paul Jarley:                         It's a popular Halloween costume.

Rick Brunson:                    There are companies selling fake news costumes. You can dress up in a fake news ... It's plastered with newspaper pages and it has red fake across the front ... Yeah. $54.95 online.

Paul Jarley:                         And combined with data analytics, it can be, well, clickalicious.

Cindy Barth:                       There are certain things that we know all we have to do is put these keywords in a headline, and we're going to have what we call a clickalicious day because everybody in town is going to be going, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on that story. We know that.

Rick Brunson:                    Where, oh where have you gone, Walter Cronkite?

Walter Cronkite:              That's the way it is. Friday, March 6th 1981.

Paul Jarley:                         This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I'm Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I've got lots of questions. To get answers, I'm talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, is this really a thing? Onto our show.

Paul Jarley:                         Let's talk a little bit about how the world is changing in really broad strokes. When we were hunter gatherers and we started to plant crops, land was the most valuable thing and the people who were the richest and the most powerful owned the most land. And then machines were invented, and the Industrial Revolution happened and market economies occurred. In that, who owned the most machines became the most powerful people. Today, the most valuable asset is information. It's data. And the most powerful people in the future are going to be the people who control the most data, and they can use that data either to help inform you or they can manipulate you with that data.

Paul Jarley:                         This gets us to the topic of fake news and whether fake news is really a thing or not. Is this something that 10 years from now we'll kind of laugh about and move on from, or will it be a part of our daily lives? And if it is, how do we determine what's fake from what's real out there? That's certainly something that my students need to know how to do, or we're all doomed. So, I brought together a panel of experts to talk a little bit about fake news, what it is, and whether it's really a thing or not. So I'm going to allow my guests to kind of introduce themselves. I'll start with Grant.

Grant Heston:                   Sure. Thank you, Paul. I'm Grant Heston. I'm our Vice President for Communications in Marketing and Chief of Staff at the University of Central Florida. I got my undergraduate degree in journalism from a university about 90 minutes north of here, a little bit smaller than us. Football team is not quite as good. And so I live and breath with this every single day.

Cindy Barth:                       Hi, I'm Cindy Barth. I'm Editor of Orlando Business Journal. I am a UCF graduate. My degree is in journalism with a minor in political science.

Rick Brunson:                    Morning, everybody. My name is Rick Brunson and I'm an Associate Instructor of Journalism at the University of Central Florida where I'm a...