The Lainhart Files

Media Bias Chart 4.0 The central premise of this chart is a qualification of the idea that we can’t “trust the biased media.” Generalizing mainstream media in that way assumes that all mainstream media has a bias (usually assumed to be liberal). This chart is meant to argue that, while there is bias in the media, there is no single focus of that bias. There is no one, monolithic "the media." There are media companies that are biased liberal and there are media companies that are biased conservative and there are those that stick closely to the ethics of objective journalism. Because of the nature of the Internet and social media, millions of people every day share memes and photos and biased information without any context or analysis of where they come from. A passive, uninformed media consumer may be unconsciously influenced by whichever media is readily available or may gravitate toward sources that speak to his or her unconscious biases. However, it is possible for yo...

  It was a cold day in March when the world closed down. Karl and his wife, Kristy, and all the world were told to stay in their houses. A plague had fallen on the world, and it wasn’t safe to be around other people. At first it wasn’t too bad. There was time to do things. The lockdown forced people to stop there rushing around. Who doesn’t like staying home? But after a few weeks, it began to wear on Karl. He got restless. Confused. Unsure. He needed something but he didn’t know what. More than that, he had a strange, new thought that he couldn’t get out of his head. Something was telling him to dig. There was a large hill in his backyard, and he’d always imagined digging a tunnel or a cave under it. So one day, with his wife looking strangely at him out the window, Karl began to dig. He walked behind his house, halfway up the hill, and drove his shovel into the green loam and pried it from the ground. On the first day, he didn’t get too far. Shoveling dirt was hard. He had a hole...

"Yellow Red Blue" by Vassily Kandisky 1925 Reviewed and updated April 2020: I'm going to guess that, even though the AP exam is upon us, you might still be unclear about what exactly a  rhetorical strategy  is. There's actually a good reason for that. "Rhetorical strategy" is one of those umbrella terms that encompasses many different ideas. One  source  will tell you that Logos, Ethos, and Pathos are the key strategies. Another  source  will tell you that words like "anaphora" and "euphony" are the way to go. And, of course, they're both right. Because the study of rhetoric has been around since ancient Greece, it's a given that there will be an overwhelming mass of different information that different authors think is important. The best thing you can do  for the AP exam  is to  not  over-think it . Stick with this. You know what rhetorical strategies are. At their  simplest,  they are the techniques th...

Source: Time.com & Getty Images In addition to examining the larger issues of racial discrimination in American society, Ta-Nehisi Coates' book Between the World and Me  also specifically addresses the American school system and how it reflects America's larger racial issues. Coates argues that "the streets" and "the schools" are "arms of the same beast" (33). The beast that he's referring to is the larger issue of what some refer to as "systemic racism," or the idea that racial inequities are built into any society's institutional structures. This idea applies to public schools because of how they are funded. Local property taxes fund American schools. Because, according to the Brookings Institute , the typical white American family has almost ten times the wealth of the typical black family, schools in predominately white areas tend to be vastly better funded than schools in black areas.  Despite the massive socioe...

Photo by  Corey Blaz  on  Unsplash The first graders held signs over their heads and chanted out loud to a cheering crowd of parents, teachers, and school board members, "We read 4,458 books!" The crowd went wild, applauding and cheering. The kids beamed. Their teacher closed with, "And remember kids, never stop reading !" The crowd cheered some more. Like Hamlet at his mother's wedding, I sat in the corner, a melancholy English teacher and couldn't stop myself from thinking, "But they will stop." According to a 2014 Common Sense Media report , 64% of seventeen-year-olds in 1984 said they read a book (for pleasure) at least once per week. In 2012 that number dropped to 40%--a 24% decrease. That means that in 2012, almost two-thirds of high school juniors or seniors did not pick up a book (eBook or print) even once a week. Plus, that's the first year that SnapChat came out and before it was big. Does anyone think that number has gone u...