Bob Gustin giving a Brown County Public Library lecture. photo by Chris Gustin
Bob Gustin
On Consuming News
” There’ s fake news on the left. There’ s fake news on the right. There’ s fake news in the center.”
~ by Boris Ladwig
Evansville schools last year put out litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats. At least that was the rumor spreading in the community.
The rumor was so persistent that Evansville- Vanderburgh School Corp. Superintendent David Smith addressed it in a school board meeting.
“ There are no litter boxes in our schools. Period. There never will be,” Smith said, according to the Evansville Courier & Press.
Brown County resident Bob Gustin, a retired newspaper editor, worries about those kinds of incidents, which have increased in frequency in the last few years, primarily because of social media. Gustin has given presentations in Brown and Bartholomew counties to provide people with tips on how to distinguish real news from fake news, whether satire, rumor, misinformation, or disinformation.
Gustin is a Colorado native who got a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. After working for papers in Colorado and Nebraska, he joined the staff at the Evansville Courier in the mid-1980s. He switched to the Evansville Press and, when that paper folded, he moved to Brown County and became managing editor of The Republic, in Columbus. He retired from there as editor in 2011.
Gustin lives in rural Brown County with his wife, Chris, who runs the Homestead Weaving Studio. The couple have two adult children, Erin, a psychologist; and Andrew, a geologist.
Gustin said that in retirement, he has tried to engage in the community in meaningful ways, joining the Brown County Literacy Coalition, the Brown County Community Foundation Scholarship Committee, and later the board of the Brown County Library, where he recently gave his presentation on fake news.
The term itself has become a victim of falsification, of sorts. Fake news used to refer to news articles that were intentionally false, but it’ s been lumped in with rumors, satire, and erroneous reporting, where the author made a mistake but did not mean to. More prominently, and in a more sinister way, the term is being appropriated by politicians who label as fake news anything that
26 Our Brown County Jan./ Feb. 2023