Join the Community Sign up for free access to premium content, valuable teaching resources, and much more. Get Free Premium Access
Our students generally don’t remember a time when there were no twenty-four-hour news networks. They don’t remember when the news consisted of thirty minutes of local evening news and then thirty of national news on each of three networks, followed by a late-night update at ten or eleven. And it really was news because that short time period didn’t allow time for commentary, and at that point we still thought the news should be factual reporting. A short segment of opinion was clearly designated as such. The “news” changed in 1980 when CNN was founded as a twenty-four-hour all-news network. You can’t spend twenty-four hours a day reporting only the facts, so the majority of what is aired now is one opinion after another, with networks sometimes having a clear bias.
So, we and our students hear almost non-stop argument when we tune in to the news channels. The Internet added a whole new outlet for opinion, and we learned during the 2016 presidential election how willing the public was to take as fact what was actually opinion or intentionally distorted news. All I have to do to find a string of arguments, good and bad, is to read through any day’s feed on social media. There are far too many people out there who have far too much time to create the day’s memes or to ferret out just the right slant on anyone’s reasoning to arouse anger or laughter.
Here is a sampling of arguments ripe for discussion in a writing class. Some of these will hang around for a while. Most, however, will be replaced quickly by others. Any week’s news has its offerings.
Image Source: “lisa and cheryl argue it out” by Amanda Wood on Flickr 10/1/05 via Creative Commons BY-ND 2.0 License
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.