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A friend asks: “Would it be bad form to point out the typos in my class materials?” My answer: Probably yes.

After I posted my grades for this term, I made a dumb typo in this celebratory meme, and a friend pointed out the error on social media. Another friend, who is just starting a new grad program, asked: Curious, would it be bad form to point out the typos in my class materials? I’d say that correcting an instructor’s proofreading errors is probably not the best way to start an…

Meme alleging Trump said “Africans Are Lazy, Good at Sex, Theft” is a hoax

I’ve seen this meme shared by several FB friends in the past few days. It’s clearly a hoax. It was created by someone who wasn’t trained as a journalist. The body of the story doesn’t even include the quotes that are mentioned in the headline. (The head says Trump said “Africans are lazy,” but in the body of the article he is talking about “African Americans.” The terms are not…

If you think I’m wrong that the media fairly covered the Cannon Hinnant murder, but you’re still reading, then I welcome you.

Plenty of news organizations have reported on the tragic case of a white boy who was murdered while riding his bicycle. One must ignore easily verifiable opposing evidence to claim that “the media” are universally ignoring this story. It’s even more unhinged to latch upon the conspiracy theory that the reason for this (non-existent) lack of coverage is that the media organizations are unified in their intention to control a…

Meme unfairly blames “protesters” for four crimes

A Facebook meme that claims “3 of these 4 honorable men were killed by ‘protesters’” is false. I don’t mean that I can prove that not a single one of the guilty parties ever participated in a protest. However, Police never connected Beaty’s death with the protests (and the FBI declined to do so when asked). Police sent out an alert that specified Underwood’s death was unrelated to protests. Dorn…

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Minneapolis protest cleanup: Did you share this meme without fact-checking it? (Don’t spread fake news about the news.)

A Facebook meme with 52k reactions and 37k shares includes pictures of volunteers cleaning the streets in Minneapolis, the day after mass protests of the death of George Floyd. The pictures make a powerful point about the values of the community. However, the text includes an unnecessary slam against journalism, because it introduces the images with “Images you won’t see in the news.” I searched news.google.com for “minneapolis protesters cleaning”…

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The Curtains Were Blue: In Which I Fix Another Meme.

Above is my response to a meme that makes some shaky assumptions about the purpose of an English classroom. Exploring the intent of the author is a huge part of the English discipline, but it’s far from the only way to study (or teach) literature. Author intent, new historicism, reader-response, structuralism… the list goes on. The fact that a character is observant enough to notice the color of the curtains…

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Journalism 101: I fixed this meme for you.

I can sympathize with the sentiment, but the top part of this meme (the white text on black background) is not how I’d frame the situation. My take (which I’ve added underneath the original) is that when two sources disagree, assuming that one must be right and the other must be wrong is a form of bias. What if one source is in New York and the other is in…