E-Mail Rebuttal: Photos of a Mexican Drug Lord’s home after being raided…....
Although the specific claim — that all of these photos came from one bust — is false, the images have gone viral due to the emotional emphasis on “riches” and “guns” but the knee-jerk reaction masks...
View ArticleChasing A Meme: The Twain Quote That Isn’t [Updated]
“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” – Mark Twain It was the meme of the moment on Twitter, in the wake of the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed...
View ArticleMeme Chasing: Literacy In America
The data points sound horrifying: 46 percent of American children enter kindergarten lacking the basic language skills they need to learn to read 61 percent of low-income children have no children’s...
View ArticleTracking a meme: suspended coffee
It came to me, as most memes do these days, via Facebook. And then it came back again. “It” was the “suspended coffee” meme. One dash of fact surrounded by copyright infringement (photography, per...
View Article“Trust me” journalism, TIME style
On display today: journalism-as-an-op-ed: juicy on claims, thin on sources. Center court: “A Nightmare Returns” (print title) in the January 20, 2014 edition of TIME. Journalist, Aryn Baker, the...
View ArticleThis is B.S.
Myth-busting. Tracking memes. Going beyond “someone’s wrong on the Internet”. Here are things to think about before retweeting (used as a proxy for “sharing” on any digital channel) something that you...
View ArticleMemebusting: about that eyewitness report of a miracle performed by Jesus
Satire, clueless sharing, and digital literacy Once-upon-a-time, satire was (pretty) clearly marked: think Mad Magazine, for example. Then along came The Onion. Today there are innumerable satirical...
View ArticleMyth-busting: a tale of two shooters
When I saw that the Montgomery County Pennsylvania shootings were trending in Australia, I discovered a tweet that sent me down a content analysis trail. In that exploration, I spent more time on...
View ArticleWill Rogers on “trickle up” economics
Posted July 28, 2012 on Political Memes There’s a meme floating around Facebook this week. It features this “trickle up” economics quote from Will Rogers: The money was all appropriated for the top in...
View ArticleQuote-busting: not Darwin
It sounds so clever, so right … that you want to share it immediately! “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most...
View ArticleThat hot 60-second “Bernie Sanders ad” isn’t a campaign ad
If it walks like an ad, quacks like an ad, but requires no out-of-pocket change to distribute … is it still an ad? And if it features a candidate, does that make it a campaign ad? Pundits sure think...
View ArticleHow common is a Supreme Court vacancy during a Presidential election?
The short answer: it isn’t. Immediately after the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died, Republican leadership indicated it did not welcome a Barack Obama nominee to replace...
View ArticleDeconstructing a meme: #NationalBookLoversDay
It slipped into my consciousness the way memes do today, via Facebook and Twitter and a hashtag. In fact, Facebook has validated this memorialization with its own explanatory post, complete with a...
View ArticleMeme-busting: Trump has not appointed Bannon to the National Security Council
You may have seen a call to action — stop Steve Bannon from being appointed to the National Security Council by opposing his confirmation hearing — on Twitter or Facebook. Steve Bannon, CEO of...
View ArticleBlack History Month: Honoring Charlotte Hawkins Brown
There’s a photo circulating on Facebook of a young black woman that is accompanied by a long caption comparing her to Rosa Parks. It is true that a Civil War-era California woman insisted she had the...
View ArticleInfographic gone bad: accuracy v truth (updated)
It landed hard in my Facebook feed. The headline and graphic were sensational, designed to shock. After all, emotional knee-jerk is what generates shares in digital networks. And boy did it get shares....
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