Dodging Deep Fakes: Facts, Fake News, and Helping Your Students Navigate the Media Landscape

In today's digital age, where misinformation spreads faster than wildfire, it's crucial to equip ourselves with the tools to discern fact from fiction. Vince Filak, an award-winning multimedia journalism professor and author from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, unravels the complex web of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation in social and news media. In a lively discussion with Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Communications Professor Tim Molina, Vince explores the challenges posed by misinformation in the digital age and shares ways in which all instructors can help their students navigate the news landscape and determine the truth among the falsehoods.

Transcript

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: [00:00:00] Welcome again to another installment of Sage College Publishing. Our podcast series this week has a lot to offer to folks that are listening out there. My name is Tim Molina. I'm a Sage faculty partner. I'm also an assistant professor of mass communication at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas.

So most of what we're going to be discussing today has a lot to do with how we go about publishing, how we go about creating content in this new environment where everyone can potentially be a sender of news information. And learning about mass communication is Essential for all students and even all faculty because we are an interdisciplinary subject matter that encompasses all forms of academic disciplines.

So we're happy that you are joining us here [00:01:00] today. Let's get down to it. Our episode topics or topics today involve fake news, misinformation and disinformation in the media. This discussion will center on what's being discussed in various public forums in college classrooms in an effort to identify critical action steps that help to promote media literacy and an informed society.

So today we have author, Vince Filak. Vince is a highly accomplished journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, with extensive experience in teaching, research, and publication. He's also received numerous awards for his work and is widely published in academic journals. His research focuses on media writing, reporting, and editing.

He's written six textbooks, including his most recent, Exploring Mass Communication, Connecting with the World of Media, [00:02:00] which is published by Sage, and Vince has served as the editor for the Journalism and Mass Communication Educator Journal. So I want to take a moment to welcome our guest.

Welcome Vince to the podcast. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: Hi Tim. Thanks for having me I really appreciate it. And I've been looking forward to this ever since we started talking about it. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: So let's get right into it We have obviously a lot to talk about and for our topic today we want to center on just First an opportunity for you to tell your story.

Tell us about your journey to becoming a professor and an author. And as I Googled you earlier in the morning today lo and behold, it is you're a journalist at heart. And so if you could. Just tell us your story and what's been your journey so far. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: Sure. Actually it's funny. I started out when I was about eight years old.

I wanted to be a lawyer. Went to college, [00:03:00] took a poli sci course and realized that wasn't going to work. So I knew that I needed to find something that was going to match with both a job field and with something that I could be, maybe something Good at and I took a journalism class fell in love with the topic, ended up trying to really, I really pushed myself to want to impress the professor.

I Steve Lorenzo was probably one of the most important people in my life. I really wanted to write well enough to impress him. I don't know if I got there yet, but I'm, I've still got time. So after that, I, Picked up a master's at the University of Wisconsin Madison and taught there for a little bit.

I went down to the University of Missouri and I taught there. I worked in the newsroom there. I also worked in a newsroom when I was in Madison. I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal. I covered mostly crime and disasters and things that go bump in the night, but And I did the same thing in [00:04:00] Missouri, but then my boss told me like, you're really good at this teaching thing.

You, you probably want to get a PhD if you're going to want to do this. So he got me into the doctoral program. I got my doctorate to, wow, 2003, I think I graduated. And then. Five years at Ball State and then another 16 here. So it's been a journey. But I think the biggest thing is that I always found myself loving the idea of teaching and helping people out.

So that's why I always love doing stuff like this, because I think it's something where We get the opportunity to talk about something, but we also get the opportunity to help out some folks. So that's the best part of my day. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you, Vince, for telling us your story and also incorporating the I think what's really important as a teacher is not just the, the academic work in the catalog you bring with that, but also the practicum.

The [00:05:00] opportunity to bring in your experiences working in a newsroom and with boots on the ground. I think there's a lot that goes with that. When students realize, hey this person isn't just telling me theories. It's actually things that he's observed that's in the news industry.

And how do we begin to harness an understanding of just Our overall new cycles that we get. And I was just talking with students about that today. Talking about, let's put off the historical context until next Tuesday. But today, as we think about news, how many of us really try to just hone in on things that we are interested in and Place ourselves in a bubble because it's safe to do that.

And many hands went up. And some of the rationale behind that, because the question was why do we do that? Why do we do that? And so a lot of students tend to have this hesitancy with consuming the hard news the crime in the city kind of things. If it bleeds, it's going to lead [00:06:00] kind of stuff.

And we're serving a new generation. I think oftentimes we think, students get their news on social media, which is mostly true. But at the same time, is that really a bad thing if we're curating that plate in such a way that allows us to follow, credible people, journalists, people that are trained to tell these stories?

And so that's where a lot of the work has to come in. And I'm going to, open that up to, to, to the next question here, which really dives into our main topic, which is misinformation. So Vince how does misinformation spread like wildfire in today's digital age with all the things that we've shared so far relative to when students come into our classrooms.

That's the essential question. How does that happen? 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: I think, Tim, I think you really hit it on the head in, in a couple of key ways. First of all is that [00:07:00] we are very let's call it, territorial in terms of our approaches. We know what we like and we know what we don't like or what we want or what we don't want.

And because there are so many different places to get it, we can go out there and get it from whichever source we want. And in most cases, it's like we want to believe it. So we tend to cluster into those media bubbles. And then it just becomes the self feeding loop of garbage where, you know, If all you want to hear is about one candidate being a terrible person or another candidate being an amazing person, or you want to hear the latest rumor about what's going on with a celebrity or something, you can find your little pocket there and wheedle in.

And then suddenly you're in this bubble where nothing else is getting in and nothing but garbage is getting recycled. But I do think the one thing that, that is even more important than that is the aspect of digital. Because digital means that you don't need a lot of resources to, to start an operation and to tell people stuff.

[00:08:00] It's basically a phone and, a phone and a dream almost is how that comes together. You have this opportunity to. Set up shop really quickly, really easily, and suddenly get a very large audience. And when you have that audience, it becomes so easy to share things quickly amongst networks that more people with less media literacy are getting involved.

It used to be, If you went to work at a newspaper or a radio station or a TV station, there's this massive investment by somebody to buy the press to establish the newsroom to, get the FCC license or, get the cameras and get the mics and things. And then. There were multiple layers of people who were all trained in that field to be able to produce content that was relevant, useful and interesting, but also factually accurate and ethically sourced.

And now, a one person operation can do it. I run a blog. I've been doing it for [00:09:00] seven years and I'm a one person band and the only time that I hear. Need to, to change or to alter something is when somebody out there decides to send me a note saying, Hey man, you missed a word or, I've found this other source.

And then I go and I correct it, but it doesn't go through the same layers as it would say, even on, a skeleton crew night desk at the state journal. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yeah, definitely the the environment now because of the technological revolution that we've experienced just within the past 20, 30 years with access to the internet with now high speed data that we can stream content with.

We create our podcasts at the college with one simple tool which is a very low barrier to entry. And we use a lot of the resources here on campus in order to do that. So we've been very thankful for that. But you're right. There's very few barriers to entry today. And that leads us into where we are today with single person operations news aggregator [00:10:00] sites.

That are driven off of your interests. And of course, we, we speak of the algorithm. And so there's this new sort of curriculum almost that I'm building to help keep up with those particular trends. And really to help answer that question throughout the course that I teach, which is.

how does it spread so quickly? And of course, when we think about the overall impact of that's leading us into Our next question for discussion here. What are those driving forces behind the spread of misinformation? That ultimately can impact like our ability to communicate as human beings.

We, we, when we think about our world today, it's easy to peek into certain News sources and gather that it's perhaps headed in a bad direction. But lo and behold there are many stories that we don't get to hear about, which are those those human interest stories. Yes.

But the ones that would help us to develop a perspective of [00:11:00] a good society of people that are typically good. And don't have bad intents. But so how does the bad intent, how does that misinformation spread so quickly? And what is the sort of engineering behind all this?

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: I think it comes down to three very key areas that, that, in some cases overlap in some cases don't but it's really something where there's a lot more money to be had and a lot more attention to be had when you're dividing people than when you're uniting people no, nobody, If you get a whole bunch of Milwaukee Brewer fans together and talk about who's going to win tonight it's not going to be a lot of disagreement going on there.

But if you get a whole bunch of Mets fans together and a whole bunch of Brewer fans together, now you're going to have, the sparks to fly. So I think the first thing that you see in a lot of these cases are ideologues who want to advance an ideology. And I think that's a [00:12:00] big part of why a lot of this comes down to the political nature and that's why you see a lot of the politics or a lot of the the kind of stuff that's on the political spectrum, a lot of stuff that's on that kind of governmental spectrum.

So they want to Kind of push their sense of this is how things are. They want their ideology to be, forefront and center for so many people to consume. So they're the ones who are pushing out information that ranges from, let's call it needs more context. All the way on through to the, this is a flat out farce.

And along that range, you get a lot of attention, especially from people who again, want to be in their own little media bubble. So if you like candidate a and you hate candidate B it's going to be something where the more somebody tells you, candidate B is really terrible. You're going to want to be riding right along with that.

And. [00:13:00] Again, the ideology kind of folks know that. I also think that people want to be liked or at the very least they want to be wanted. So a lot of times you'll see people doing things that are just, utterly despicable on social media because they want that dopamine hit of the like, of the share, of the attention.

And, I go back to the shooting that they had in Las Vegas a number of years back. You have this mass shooting largest death toll of a mass shooting in United States history. And somebody gets on Twitter and puts out a picture of a man in a suit. And it says, I'm looking for my father.

He's missing. Please help me find him. And of course, the human. The human thing to do and the humanity we all have is, oh my gosh, this poor guy. And so we're sharing and resharing and all this stuff. It's a fraud. It turns out it's a photo of an adult actor named Johnny Sins and the kid did it on [00:14:00] purpose.

They ended up tracking this guy down and said what is your problem? Why did you do this? His answer was you know why I did it for the likes. That sense of, dig me, for lack of a better word, is one of the ways that it goes. And of course there's always that third element that covers over everything, which is money.

As I've often said before, money isn't everything, but it beats the heck out of whatever comes in second for a lot of folks. And if you think about it, if there's this one eternal element that powers everything, it's money. The more that you can grow an audience on X or on Instagram or on TikTok, that brings along sponsors, that brings along advertising, that brings along obviously money.

And again, when everybody is loud at a certain level, people who get louder, or when people are this outlandish and you can get that outlandish that's going to bring more attention, I My daughter's a teenager and she was getting into this whole, [00:15:00] case of this whole diddy case that's that continues to unfold and i'm sure it'll continue to unfold for forever, but the stuff she's like asking me questions about stuff and i'm like Where did you get that?

She's Oh, it's on Tik Tok and she'll show me stuff. And it's just mind blowing, especially for somebody who's, I consider myself very media literate, it's everything from Diddy was hiding Tupac somewhere and he's still alive all the way on through to the feds were planting all the baby oil they kept finding.

And I'm like, Where are they getting this? And the answer is nowhere. They're just literally hey, wouldn't it be interesting if, and then they spin a conspiracy to get a lot of people to pay attention. And then people who maybe aren't as media literate are going to take that as gospel. And I think that's one of the bigger problems that we run into a lot.

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I'm preparing a little activity. I would say little, but it's the whole class period about an hour long where students will investigate that story. But we'll be trying to write [00:16:00] a story about that case in particular from within, the framework of this group, you're going to be An organization that is NBC, right?

A major mainstream broadcast television agency. And so who are your stakeholders and how does, how do those stakeholders help to influence the way you cover this story? And then we'll be looking at some other examples of students writing this for, as a non profit news organization. Still crafting that up, but I think it's important to, to place them in those situations so they can realize that, however you get your news look at the author.

And consider the source in many of these cases, because oftentimes if it's, an influencer on social media that you like to follow you really have to dig deep and begin to ask yourself, do I really trust this person as authentic as they might [00:17:00] sound? And as personal as they might be.

We have to ask those questions. And I think for many of the students that I teach intro, introduction, mass communication, freshman level course, many of those students are 18, 19 years old. And so this is the first time that they've been exposed to this type of course, where they're being asked to ask questions about who they're getting their information from.

And again, where are they getting it from? And allow them to see. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: I've got a book for that. So if you need anything, just let me know. There's a, I got to, I think I have a textbook for about half of everything, but yeah, we should definitely, we always have to understand the audience.

And I think it, it came to me very clearly when, I was writing the exploring mass comic book, which is for, the 18, 19 year old intro class. And I kept looking for examples and I kept looking for ways to explain stuff. And the editor I was working with kept saying, Vince that's not.

in their purview. That's not that's too old or that's not. And I'm like, give me a break. [00:18:00] What the heck? And he says, you have to write this for Zoe, who's my daughter. And at the time I was looking at this thing, I'm like, Zoe's 14 years old. This is absolutely ridiculous that I would be writing.

And then he said okay, when's it going to be done? And then I started doing the math and I'm like, yeah, by the time this thing gets out there, she'd probably be right about ready to take the, okay. So I sat down with my kid And really did that thing that you're talking about, which is, and I love that exercise, by the way, because I think it makes them think a little bit more about not just I got the information, but where did you get the information?

And I sat down with her and we started going through a lot of the different things where, okay, who told you that? Where did you get that from? Do you see that other places? And being able to get her to be more, more at least skeptical, I think. And a lot of times people see skepticism as a bad idea, but I think, they're used to the idea that somebody gives them the answer has to be right.

And then we just write that down and we [00:19:00] move on because that's an unfortunate by product of a testing kind of education. But I think what you're doing is really amazing because it gives them that idea of no, there's not a, I tell it to you and then you just write it down. It's go figure this stuff out so that you can better understand it when you face it the next time, which I think is always crucial.

So it's great to see that kind of stuff coming out of classrooms like that. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: So I started my class with a two minute paper and I simply just asked them to write their thoughts on and this was entitled teach the O. G. because they call me the O. G. and I said, okay, I'll take that. I'll, I don't know if I'm quite O.

G. status, but I'll take it. But this is let's teach the O. G. how we get the news today, because for me, it's, I still have my. San Antonio Express News app, and I, I pay for it. It's 4 a month. And I'm just traditional like that. I listen to, several Associated Press.

I listen to the NPR every eight [00:20:00] o'clock hour. And I feel I'm that traditional sensible type of person helps me out a lot in making decisions. But asking them those questions, right? And helping us to get to not just the how, from whom, within the how, right?

Okay, you got it on YouTube, but who's the author? Who published this and just really looking at that and determining who are those primary sources behind sometimes these false narratives. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: Yeah, and I think that's, again, it's I would ask my dad sometimes like, where'd you see that?

And he'd say I saw it on the internet. And I'm like, yeah, that's a big place. And so the same thing is now happening with my daughter in a different way, which is, oh, I got it on Tik TOK. And I don't want to bash Tik TOK because I view Tik TOK the same way I view X, the same way I view Instagram, same way I view, the San Antonio news express.

The idea is that they're all. literally tools in the toolbox. So whether it's [00:21:00] you get your newspaper on an app or you get it on the website, or they still, God forbid, drop it off on your doorstep, once a day or if you get it through tick tock or Facebook or whatever, you It's the platform itself is really neutral.

It's what's being done with it. It's like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a house and, make shelter for someone, or you can use a hammer to go, knock somebody in the head and really hurt them. And it's not the hammer's fault. Either way, and I think that what we need to look at is, okay, more like what you're saying, who is the provider, not just what is the platform, because that gives them a better sense of, okay, source matters, More than platform matters.

So we're not, dare I speak for the O. G. But we're not just old guys who are like if it's not printed on ink and dead tree pulp, then it doesn't count. No, we're like, Where are you getting this? So that [00:22:00] we can go look at it and then say to people, okay, what is this person's background in this?

Like, why would you believe them? It's if right now you went into the hospital and you sat in a room and somebody walked in a white coat and a stethoscope and said, all right, we're going to check you out. You assume they're a doctor, or at least you'd hope they're a doctor.

But if all of a sudden the nurse walked in and went. Oh, I'm sorry. He's he's a permanent resident and they walked him out. You'd be a little concerned, right? I think that with this, we have that kind of thing is okay. Just because you have a fancy setup and you've got 500, 000 followers, it doesn't necessarily track that, any more than that random guy in the white coat.

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yes. That's good stuff there. So The the next question that I wanted to ask, I feel like we've covered a lot so far. When we think about, obviously, you just mentioned that [00:23:00] example and it made me think of, what do we deem as credible? And for a large part of our conversations we tend to now venture into this idea that credibility is not just expert credibility, but could potentially become I find this person credible because I can relate to them.

And so oftentimes that might be the answer to this question, which is why do certain groups cling to different false narratives, even when they seem absurd to other people. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: And I think, again, we did touch on some of that. I think clearly confirmation bias is a huge thing.

If you, we have so many sources out there that we can pick. It's not like it was, 30, 40 years ago, or even further back where, you had three TV channels and you had maybe a morning paper and afternoon paper and that was it. And we all shared that same thing. So you all got The same thing that I got and that the neighbor got and we all at least we could form an opinion on what we [00:24:00] saw but we were all based on a certain level of these are the facts.

Now, you can learn things from anywhere and I put learn in quotation marks because you're just getting information. And so if you think poorly of, say, a presidential candidate, in terms of their track record of telling the truth, or if you think about, say, maybe a candidate being bad at managing money or something like that, when you hear a story that says, Hey, that candidate is lying, or, that candidate can't manage money, you're more likely to believe it.

Even if it's not true, it just fits with the paradigm that you're used to. So that's one of those things. But to be fair to this generation, and to be fair to the people who are dealing with this stuff, it doesn't help that the fakers are getting better at the same time that we are becoming less and less media literate as a society.

I remember Very vividly, you could always find the fake news because it was in the world news weekly, [00:25:00] the incredible bat boy is on the loose, it's right there. And, anybody with a half a brain can tell that this, there's somebody drew this and it looks, completely fake.

And, there are times where it's like, Certain things seem like they should be completely fake, but they, you can't really tell on a first glance. We've just had another kind of set of storms and I'm sure that shark swimming down the freeway photo is going to show up again as it has with the last three, four, five hurricanes.

And. Somebody's gonna post it out there as real and a whole bunch of people who haven't seen it before are gonna go Oh my god I can't believe a shark got onto the freeway And I gotta be honest with you if I looked at it just as a I'm like it looks insane But I can't tell it like I could look at the bat boy and realize that's not a real thing.

But there is one thing that I don't think that we talk about enough. And I think it's this, the world is getting smaller. And by that, it allows [00:26:00] us to get more stuff from more places than we ever could. But the world's also getting weirder. And because we can get all of this stuff from everywhere and because stuff is getting weirder.

What we would normally look at and say, Oh, come on, that can't be right. It is right. In some cases, I ended up pulling four headlines about just outlandishly weird criminal activity. And I took two of those headlines. They were real. I took two fake headlines that I made up that were or that were sorry that were made up to look like real news.

So basically somebody posted all these things. Two of them were real stories in real legitimate news agency articles. Some two were like on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. But they were all about the same kind of thing. It was just something really weird that somebody had done. One of them was an allegation that some guy climbed up on a a light pole and was hanging over traffic and pooping on cars.

And then there was another one about [00:27:00] a guy who was arrested after he was trying to film himself having relations with his own dog. Now, one of those is right. And one of those is wrong. And. other than a flip of the coin based on that, I have a hard time believing that anybody could just go, Oh, that's obviously the fake one.

So that's the problem that we run into. We see so many, I know the Florida man meme has been beaten to death, but it's not just that person or that theme. It's the idea that we have constantly got. Weirder and weirder things going on. So if you were to tell me that, somebody in, Sheboygan, Wisconsin got arrested for, holding up a, a gas station because they needed cheese curds.

Yeah, I'd probably believe it. Probably wouldn't be true, but I'd probably believe it. I'm like that kind of tracks with what I know about Sheboygan and what I know about Wisconsin and what I know about cheese. We're all we're trapped in that way where we can't tell and I had other people look at those headlines.

They said pick out the fake [00:28:00] ones. And they couldn't do it other than and the one person who got one or two of them, I said, how did you know? It goes, it was just a guess. I have no idea. It was just a random lottery of eeny, meeny, miny, moe. And so that tells you something. And I think that's why we have these things again.

There's not one silver bullet answer, but there's all of these kinds of interlocking pieces that come together to really create the chaos that. Yeah. unfortunately leads to where we are now with all this misinformation and fake news. So I'm curious, which one was the real story? 

The real story was the man with the dog.

fake story was the man hanging over the traffic, pooping on cars. Go figure. Wow. It's a really weird world out there, Tim. And again, that's, like I said, I think that's a big part of it, and we love oddity as an interest element, and I remember scoping out the, the old snaggletooth.

interest elements of like fame and oddity and conflict [00:29:00] and immediacy and impact and oddity like always shows up. And if you can always tell too, cause there's if you go to like even a reputable website, you go to something like a CNN or you go to a, a really reputable website and you look, it's like the most clicked articles, like the first one.

political like race titans as polls do, blah, blah, blah. And then there'll be some international article like, president talks tough about Putin. And then the third one is always something like water skiing squirrel arrested for bank robbery or something. And you're like, wait, what? And you're like, I gotta click on that.

That's you know, how we are in some ways. And I think that because we see so much of that kind of weird stuff, we tend to believe it more. It becomes something that's a lot more believable than it would have been when we didn't have so much weird. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: It seems I don't know if this is the right word, but it's maybe like a new form of being desensitized with headlines, and and a lot of this is historical too, we were just looking at a, an image, a cartoon image William [00:30:00] Randolph Hearst dressed in a jester.

Costume and spreading the yellow journalism papers across to the new immigrants of the West. And so you ask students, what do you see here? And so it's rather appealing to say, yeah. It looks like what we're dealing with today. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: To 

some extent.

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: So yeah. So with that said how can we, with students' concerns today about. Their news feed or just where do even we, where do we begin with the weird world? How might they how might we as as teachers, professors, how might we help them address these issues together in the classroom, help them access credible resources.

sift through the information and gosh, just figure out ways to interpret all the madness sometimes. And maybe just figure out a way to evaluate their news feeds and help them to push forward. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: For starters, I think, and I applaud you for what you're doing with your class, because I think we need a media literacy course in every general [00:31:00] education curriculum for every institution of higher learning that we can shake a stick at, because if we're really concerned about students having important life skills, which is supposedly what, the general education kind of block of Courses is supposed to do.

I can't imagine one that's more important right now. At the very least, it should, at least it should rank up there with, reading and effective writing and being able to do math. So I think that's crucial because we're going to need to be able to have this generation, like you say, interpret, sift, digest, comprehend, and also push back on things.

And if we don't teach them how to do that, it's if we never made them take driver's ed and we just handed them a set of keys at the age of 16 and said, go for it. There's a lot of danger out there. Second of all, I think we need to find a way to get past the provincial nature of content.

What I mean by that is we need to look at a wide [00:32:00] spectrum of sources instead of just saying that a certain source is always good or always bad. Because, having worked in newsrooms, I know there were better days and there were worse days. There were days where we were, right as rain and there were days where we got rained on.

We need to, that doesn't mean everybody gets a seat at the table, but what it does mean is you can't just say, Oh, that showed up on fill in the blank of whatever website it is. That can't be true. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not, or maybe there's a kernel of truth that you need to go out there and investigate.

But at the very least you need to be able to say get out of the bubble of just these few sources. They keep feeding themselves and each other and really expand and look around you. So I read things. In places that don't necessarily fit my interests or my personal paradigm because I want to see what's out there and then I want to be able to see even if [00:33:00] I don't like it, it still could be true and that's when I do my work and in looking into it a little bit more.

But the third thing I think, and this is something I've said for a long time, I write this a lot is I say we need to become and teach these kids how to become non denominational skeptics. And what I mean by that is that you need to approach all content with a form of skepticism regardless of how much you agree with it, or how much you disagree with it, or how much that source is your best friend, or how much that source is coming from your worst enemy.

And that is crucial because then you learn to be cautious. And by being cautious, it gives you time to think and reflect. I go back to it's a funny moment. My wife, Amy, and I will be eating someplace and, and I'll be eating something I really like. I'm like, I take a scoop full and I'll push it toward, I'll go, Oh, here.

And she backs [00:34:00] up and she looks at it. And I'm like, it's me. I, I'm eating it. And she says, you didn't have siblings. And I went, Oh, and it's yeah, it's like my brother and my sister put some God awful stuff on a spoon and did that. And so she always eyeballs it, even though it's coming from me, we've been married 22 years and she's still doing the, I'm not a hundred percent sure on this yet.

I like that for our news consumption as well, because, or any information consumption, because, just because, just because you said it doesn't make it true any more than just because I said it makes it true. And by that non denominational skepticism, that idea of, I'm not going to allow my faith in a source or my faith in this being the way I think drive my belief on all the elements that come my way in the media, and I think honestly, in that same way, finally, I guess what I would like to [00:35:00] have them do is reverse the process in which we check our information.

Because right now, when we're working through stuff, and I know I do it, I know a lot of people do it, I'm sure it's probably the way that we've all been taught, which is, you're reading along, you're checking something out, and when you hit something that doesn't seem like it makes sense, then you go check it out.

You go say, okay, I got to go fact check this. So if I were to tell you that I had a a sister who was 30 years old, you'd be like, okay, 30 year old sister, blah, blah, blah. But if I told you I had a sister who was 130 years old, you'd be like, wait, hold on. I got to fact check that, that can't be right.

I don't have a sister at all. The point is that instead of saying, let's look at everything like it's right until we can prove it's wrong. Flip it over and just look at everything and say, I'm going to assume everything I read is wrong. And I have to prove it right [00:36:00] before I let it out the door. And that can start as easily as I'm going to fact check to make sure that name is spelled right.

Cause I don't think your name is spelled right on the screen. I'm going to fact check that address. Cause I don't think that address is right. Even though it's, on this press release this way, or, even goes to the bigger things like, just because. A particular candidate has said God awful things in the past, whether it's racism or sexism or, it being anti LGBTQ.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they said this particular thing in this particular space fit that paradigm. I want to be able to go back and prove that's right before I add that to the pile of all the despicable things that they've said. And it's the same thing with like that way I can say, all right, now I know for sure that this is part of that truly awful set of things that this person is saying.

So that gets life a lot easier. It forces us to do more work up front, but [00:37:00] there's also more investment in and more confidence in the content that we're creating and sharing. And I think that's a better way to do it as opposed to, share everything, let God sort it out. 

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yes that's a whole new level of interrogation and evaluation in really helping students and anyone out there listening to figure out a best way forward.

And I don't think there is a best way for, I love the. The non denominational skepticism. I feel like that really hits on that confirmation bias bubble that we tend to find ourselves in. And it was interesting to note that, as much as that bubble can lead you down a rabbit hole that might be filled with misinformation.

Sometimes even in my own personal feed where I feel like I, I want to look up stories that are, fake or find misinformation doesn't exist in my ecosystem. So I have to go incognito sometimes [00:38:00] or not log into YouTube just to see what the what is happening out there, because I'm sheltered from those things, just based on my personal media habits myself, and so that can work in reverse when you're preparing for a class about misinformation.

You're not subject to many of those things. It was a 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: shocker. I'm not going to lie to you. When I sat down with Zoe and she's like running her TikTok feed for me and she's running her social media feeds. I'm like, Oh, okay. Wow. So this is what you're seeing. And she's Yeah. And I'm like, okay, this, it's starting to make a lot more sense now why it is that you are having the kinds of questions that you're having.

And I am looking at this thinking, why would you have that question or why would that thought come to your head? Again, you're right. The more you, the more you feed the algorithm beast, the more the beast keeps coming back to you and bigger and stronger and more. Yeah. So you're right.

It totally does. And I'm, [00:39:00] I have that problem too. Sometimes where I'm like, gosh, I gotta go find some stuff. That's, a little bit different. And the first thing I do is I say, okay, Zoe, what are you following? Or I'll ask that, the kids will be hanging out, before class or after class.

And I'm like, okay, who are you getting stuff from? What do you use where you go? And then I have a like a a set aside area where it's like, all right, let's go look in the classroom. The closet of weird and see what's out there that they're all experiencing.

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: Yeah. Helps us to to, to prepare. A more relevant class that we can really help them to relate to this, these kinds of topics and really help them to resonate with the idea that, yes, we are subject to these to these false narratives at times. Vince, I had a slew of other questions.

I know we're just trying to keep this pretty succinct and, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any other thoughts you might've had anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today. And please include also too, like, where can we find more of your [00:40:00] work? How can we connect with you?

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: Sure. I guess the one thing I'd like to leave people with is this. I'm not bashing any particular platform or any particular sender or any particular user, but I do think that like most things moderation of use is a good idea. It also helps to consider, When we talk about media engagement, let's actually engage with the media.

That means thinking, not just turning on TikTok and letting it run, or scroll, scroll scroll until something looks, ooh, what's the, what's the car wreck of the day element of this particular feed. I like to keep up to date with these kinds of things because I really do think that if you want to teach kids you have to understand them.

It's just like any other audience. If you want to write well for a newspaper or do well in broadcast or, any of those things, you have to know the audience that you're serving. And I think of myself as a teacher that I'm serving an audience. And so I have to be able to reach [00:41:00] them in a way that makes sense to them.

And That means that I gotta keep up to date. I can't just keep pulling out, the old yellow set of notes that have been working since, 1997 or whatever. But I always tell students also, and this goes to anybody who happens to hear this My door is always open. If you want anything from me, email me.

I'm sure the wonderful people at Sage could put that up on a slide somewhere. It's i vffilak at gmail dot com. But also, I've got the Dynamics of Writing blog. I started writing it when I did the reporting book. And it was supposed to be We didn't really know what it was supposed to be, but really what it has become is it's a support for all of the textbooks, but it's also a clearinghouse for opportunities to discuss current events, things that are going on alerts for things that people might not be paying attention to.

I just did a series on. A professor who got fired and there's a First Amendment claim on that. I did a, a look at, we've [00:42:00] done looks like fake news. We've done looks at different things and at the end of the day, the goal is always to have some content. When a professor is I really want to be having a discussion on a topic, you can look through that whole archive and find anything you need.

Plus I, put extra exercises and things up there in case you need a hand to, it's I need something new to do. Great, that's available to you. And I always promise everybody that if you tell me that you want me to blog on something, I'll put it together. So if there's something where you're like, gosh, I wish we could do something on this or that, or the other thing, that was something that actually happened with ai.

Somebody said, I wish I wish somebody would cover AI a little bit more. So I did a three part series on ai. We did a. video on AI. We sent that out to people. So I think the key thing is that my Best times in life are the ones where I'm feeling like I'm helping people. So if I can be helpful to you, you just let me know and I'll try to make that happen.

Tim Molina, Sage Faculty Partner and Mass Comm Professor at Northwest Vista College: I'll tell you what, this was definitely helpful for me to increase the vocabulary terminology in the [00:43:00] media world and how to describe and explain what is happening. And you're right. You can't go into each course, without taking a look and preparing and, making those key decisions to make sure that the information, the content you're providing to your audience group is relevant, and it really hits home with them.

I always tell students, when you take a mass communication class, what comes with that is not just a grade, it's the life skill of being able to really investigate, interrogate, like you've never had to do before. A lot of this access to information comes with a lot of responsibility and we're living in that age.

Let's work at it. We're not the best at it sometimes. I have my faults too. We're experiencing a, what is potentially going to be a panic period. Purchase this weekend because of the the port strike. And so that has hit the local community in the Facebook feed. So, needless to say, I've got a lot of work to do here.

Yeah, that's this is a great conversation to be had. [00:44:00] I'm sure we could dive into more, but we want to thank you Vince for joining us on this podcast and thank you all for listening. 

Dr. Vince Filak, Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Sage Author: Thanks, Tim. I really appreciate it. And anytime you need me for anything, just give me a holler.