{"id":2017,"date":"2010-05-01T10:07:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-01T14:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2010-05-01T10:07:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-01T14:07:45","slug":"bogus-trend-story-of-the-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/05\/01\/bogus-trend-story-of-the-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Bogus trend story of the week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s one of my neurotic hang-ups:\u00a0 I loathe bad journalism.\u00a0 I don’t just tsk at it.\u00a0 I bristle, I stew, I sulk.\u00a0 When I perpetrate lousy reporting myself — and yes, I do it occasionally — I feel wretched for days, even if the screw-up was minor.<\/p>\n

As a consequence, I love web sites that try to keep journalists honest.\u00a0 Even when their complaints are snarky or smart-allecky, as long as they’ve got the goods, it makes for great and important reading.<\/p>\n

An excellent example is the Bogus Trend Story Of The Week feature on Slate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jack Shafer tracks down journalists who are rather obviously trying to make mountains out of molehills.\u00a0 This week’s example?<\/p>\n

The New York Times is claiming<\/a> that “a growing number” of expatriate Americans are giving up their citizenship.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have seen is a substantial change in mentality among the overseas community in the past two years,\u201d said Jackie Bugnion, director of American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy group based in Geneva. \u201cBefore, 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another sign of the great unraveling of our society?\u00a0 A symptom of accelerating globalization?<\/p>\n

Uh, no.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

The particularly icky thing about this kind of reporting is that it’s not simply an error of fact.\u00a0 It’s an effort by a journalist to inflate something insignificant into a trend, a pattern.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, this is what reporters are told to do:\u00a0 Help interpret the world for your audience.\u00a0 Make sense of the vast glut of information.\u00a0 Help build perspective.<\/p>\n

Those are important things.\u00a0 I’m a big believer in context.\u00a0 But it’s a slippery slope.\u00a0 Sometimes a reporter goes looking for a trend and finds an anomaly, or trivia, or nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s one of my neurotic hang-ups:\u00a0 I loathe bad journalism.\u00a0 I don’t just tsk at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2018,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}