Where Does Jack Shafer Get Off?
Slate’s Jack Shafer routinely writes about “bogus trend pieces” that run in various newspapers, taking journalists to task for blind-sourcing, having too few sources, using sketchy numbers, or relying to platitudes instead of conducting actual reporting. His targets range from teenage drug-use scares in local market affiliates to silly Sunday Styles-type what’s-hip-with-the-youngs pieces. He’s right that these trend pieces have serious epistemological issues; they reek of a priori reasoning, which has no place in journalism. They seem like the kind of thing that you write up, then are compelled by an editor to “go get a quote” on, or whatever. Instead of the other way around.
While Shafer would be right to scold venerable papers like The New York Times or The Washington Post for using this sort of reasoning, I think he goes a bit too far, and that his position at Slate makes him a bit vulnerable for a couple of reasons.
1.) Whether potbellies were cool in Williamsburg or not in 2007 is of significantly less import than whether there were WMD in Iraq in 2003.
I suspect that Shafer sees trend reporting, and its specious, unexamined claims as a low-level version of the failure of US journalism in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Journalists were fed information by a secretive administration - and made to feel privileged, in this regard - and then they passed it off on the American public without really examining the issue enough, or presenting competing evidence. This problematic way of “reporting” - without really doing any “real” reporting, i.e. finding out new facts - bears obvious similarities to trend reporting, except for in its impact. No one will die if they falsely believe that potbellies are cool on Bedford Ave. Thousands have died because of the war in Iraq.
2.) Slate traffics in this sort of BS all day, every day
And I love them for it, but you can’t deny that Slate stories tend to be titled with rhetorical questions that don’t really get answered, or cheap takedowns of media narratives, or Christopher Hitchens. The same day as Shafer’s latest piece on bogus trend pieces (that prompted this), Slate ran a story titled “Poor Little CEOs: The government’s giving them everything they want, yet they still whine”. The only actual CEO the story quotes or even refers to is GE’s Jeff Immelt. Perhaps the story should be retitled and rewritten to be just about him; only problem is that if they did that, they would have done no original reporting of any sort. Another story was about how Republicans are jockeying for position in social media in anticipation of the 2011 primaries.
Slate exists to comment on the news. It’s rare that they break it. And commentary is what Slate is good at. But when your sheer existence is predicated on the mass proliferation of “actual reporting” - be it newspapers, cable news, etc - there comes a point, I think, that you have to stop beating up on it, without opening up your own editorial team to criticism. What would Shafer make of many of Slate’s stories, given the opportunity?
3. The only reason the New York Times, et al do this is because of places like Slate.
Let’s not pretend that The New York Times runs stories on Williamsburg potbellies, Park Slope babies-in-bars and Bushwick fill-in-the-blank to boost their print sales. It’s not as if people pick up the Times for the fucking trend reporting. People like the Tuesday Science Times, the Monday crossword, Frank Rich on Sundays, along with the magazine and the Week in Review.
But, on the internet, things are different. Much like how Flavorpill or Cracked traffic only in so-called listicles to drive up SEO and end up on linkbait-aggregator sites like Digg, the NYT and WaPo now have to do this shit, too. Obviously, this is a way to make money in online advertising sales, which if I remember correctly accounted for a full 25% for NYT’s income this last quarter (year? can’t recall; don’t care to look it up). Check the most emailed column on the NYT’s website and you find out what your parents read while they’re at work: recipes that involve quinoa, stuff about Paris, stuff about middle-aged people’s health, Paul Krugman, and trend pieces. No one is emailing their friends with the latest from the Senate Banking Committee markup hearing on SB-who-gives-a-shit, even though the NYT and WaPo most likely both have reporters there, or would like to.
It’s trite to say, but the internet has changed many things about journalism. For older papers like the NYT, they have to compete with online outlets like Slate online as well as in print (in a certain sense). So, I’d argue that they do this sort of trend reporting just to compete with online markets, and that these stories are therefore pretty innocuous. They aren’t replacing real journalism, just supplementing it. There’s nothing really wrong with that.
4.) Journalism is not academia.
Most of the time, trend pieces take one piece of “real” news - a down economy, say - and then make it relevant to your life by interviewing a handful of young people that probably lay on the fringes of said journalist’s social network, and piecing together a “trend” through anecdotal evidence and maybe a quote from an “expert”. It’s intuitive, because I’d also say it’s how we place ourselves in larger historical context in our heads. In this case, the paper is foisting that upon us, but whatever: it’s entertainment.
Shafer seems to hold newspapers to the standards of peer-reviewed journals, and I find it ridiculous, especially coming from a website like Slate. If newspapers had the same stringent standards as academic journals, they would hardly be able to put out a few hundred words of copy per day. It’s clear that Shafer’s problem with trend reporting is its lax relationship with the truth, and its use of sketchy numbers. If he wants to work in a world that makes it so difficult to assert an observation and place it within larger historical trends without a lit review and tons of data sets, I suggest he go back to school and get his Ph.D.
5.) Jack Shafer should write a book about the War on Drugs.
Shafer is clearly very passionate about the War on Drugs, and how damaging it has been to America. For this reason, he regularly writes take-downs of bogus drug trend reporting. I think this is a worthy cause, and a man as smart as Shafer should devote his time to a worthy pursuit, that will add to the human body of knowledge, and perhaps tilt public opinion, leading to public policy changes down the road. That, or he can continue to bash Oklahoma City’s NBC affiliate for some lazy fact-checking on a piece about cough syrup abuse, or whatever.
I just think his talent is wasted bashing other journalists for something that his own employer does, and has forced newspapers to do, in a sense. Also, I’m really bored tonight.
