Bogus trend story of the week

Here’s one of my neurotic hang-ups:  I loathe bad journalism.  I don’t just tsk at it.  I bristle, I stew, I sulk.  When I perpetrate lousy reporting myself — and yes, I do it occasionally — I feel wretched for days, even if the screw-up was minor.

As a consequence, I love web sites that try to keep journalists honest.  Even when their complaints are snarky or smart-allecky, as long as they’ve got the goods, it makes for great and important reading.

An excellent example is the Bogus Trend Story Of The Week feature on Slate.

Jack Shafer tracks down journalists who are rather obviously trying to make mountains out of molehills.  This week’s example?

The New York Times is claiming that “a growing number” of expatriate Americans are giving up their citizenship.

“What we have seen is a substantial change in mentality among the overseas community in the past two years,” said Jackie Bugnion, director of American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy group based in Geneva. “Before, no one would dare mention to other Americans that they were even thinking of renouncing their U.S. nationality. Now, it is an openly discussed issue.”

Another sign of the great unraveling of our society?  A symptom of accelerating globalization?

Uh, no.  It turns out the number of expats who gave up their citizenship last year was 743 — out of roughly 5.2 million Americans living abroad.

As Shafer points out, “The piece neither quotes nor names any American expatriate who surrendered citizenship in 2009. The article’s chattiest talking head is an unnamed source who gave up her citizenship years ago.”

The particularly icky thing about this kind of reporting is that it’s not simply an error of fact.  It’s an effort by a journalist to inflate something insignificant into a trend, a pattern.

Increasingly, this is what reporters are told to do:  Help interpret the world for your audience.  Make sense of the vast glut of information.  Help build perspective.

Those are important things.  I’m a big believer in context.  But it’s a slippery slope.  Sometimes a reporter goes looking for a trend and finds an anomaly, or trivia, or nothing.