Part 1:

This image seems like a nice picture of who we all know as Kevin from the Office, or Brian Baumgartner, and his wife, Celeste Ackleson. On my normal Saturday afternoon scrolling through Instagram, I came across this picture on a meme page accompanied with the caption, “This is Kevin from The Office and his wife. Now I’m not saying she’s a gold digger, but she’s literally holding him by the Rolex.” After a good laugh, I thought to myself, no way this can be real. Now I am aware that the caption had such a big influence on my immediate perception of it. If I had seen this picture alone, I probably would not have thought twice about it, but because of it’s hilarious nature, it just seemed so bazaar. As I sat down to write this blog, I thought back on this picture and said to myself, Is it real???

Since this image came from a famous meme page with millions of followers that alters photos to include captions, I had a hard time doing a reverse image search. Instead, what I did was attempt to find the photo on Google by searching “Brian Baumgartner and wife.” I found only one matching photo on this link: https://heightline.com/brian-baumgartner-wife-weight-loss/. Underneath this photo contained a link titled “image source.” This gave immediate direction to the source (Love Lace Media) that supplied this article with the photo. I decided to dig a little deeper and reach out to the team at Love Lace Media, in order to track down the original photo. Unfortunately, they did not respond in time for me to put it into an EXIF reader. This was as far as I could get into decoding this picture.

Since this image only had one matching result on my Google search, it didn’t seem to be very popular. In that case, I am almost certain that the image was not altered, and was in fact, originally taken and published by Love Lace Media without any alteration.

Part 2:

This article was provided by the New York Times on September 2^nd, 2018. It was written by NY Times White House Correspondent, Katie Rogers. While this article is an informative piece about Meghan McCain and her relationship with her father,  John McCain, it is rather biased. It is very clear that Rogers admires Ms. McCain and her determined mindset. Rogers’s use of quotes as evidence throughout the article is notable. From family friends of Ms. McCain, to Meghan herself, Rogers picks out very positive and strong quotes to argue her point. I conclude that the logic behind this article is to persuade the reader into becoming fond of Meghan McCain because she spoke very highly of John’s daughter and pointed out very credible things she has done/stands for. I commend Rogers for her use of pathos throughout the article in her creative writing. She brings her points home by evoking strong emotions, especially in the hook of the article when she states, “But as Ms. McCain shared one of her father’s dying directives — “Show them how tough you are” — her voice stopped wavering. The warrior’s daughter steeled herself, drew her eyes up and stepped into battle.” Lastly, since this article is so clearly biased, I think it leaves out important parts of Ms. McCain’s life. From what we have read, she seems to only have done good, but no one is perfect and there must be some faults lying somewhere. This gives the reader a suspicious feeling about the negative side, if there is one.