While drinking my morning tea I usually check the websites of 5 or 6 newspapers. This is not a hard and fast 5 or 6, it depends on the nature of events taking place, my own mood, amount of time I have before leaving for work, etc.
This morning I happened to check the London Free Press website. I don't check the Free Press more than once a week or so. It is generally filled with articles pulled from the AP wire and poorly written crap about local politics. The Free Press is a small paper from a city of 400 000 people or so in South Western Ontario. I would imagine it is owned by one of the giant companies of media empire but I honestly don't care enough to look right now. I am generally more interested in the local news from this paper as I grew up in London ON. This morning, I happened across an article discussing how St. Thomas (a smaller city near London) should not buy Fords for their police department cruisers again if Ford does not increase their efforts to keep workers employed at the local assembly plant.
It is not the content of the article that caught my attention, rather, the implications of the truth claims made therein. Apparently it is acceptable journalism to reprint what some random (at least to me) person writes on twitter as evidence for an argument. How can I expect a higher standard from my students when it is acceptable for a professional writer with an editor? This is just another example, the more a truth claim fits the dominant ideology, the less the masses will question it irrespective of how weak the source is (unless I am missing something about Twitter?).
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