I'm coming late to the game (that's not uncommon), but here's a wonderful piece by Jack Shafer of Slate deconstructing a sloppily reasoned Times article Who You Calling "Arab"? - Considering today's New York Times story about Arabs. I mean, Muslims. No, brownish people from the Middle East. Or possibly South Asia. By Jack Shafer.
After reading Shafer's dissection of Leslie Wayne's piece, you might reasonably ask how this piece of tortured journalism managed to get into the paper at all, much less above the fold and on page one. The answer, I think, is that the Times wants so much to be the newspaper that discovers trends, the paper that has its fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist.
In general, that's a good thing which most papers miss. Most papers are content to print "daily" stories with little real context. The Times searches assiduously for context. But sometimes there's no context.
Thirty years ago there was no Internet, no cable news, hence no instant analysis except on the really big stuff that transcended the 30-minute evening news. Newspapers reported the breaking stuff and weekly newsmagazines -- Time, Newsweek -- scrambled to find trends and context. Reporters and researchers, like so many intelligence analysts, combed the newspapers looking for obscure items which might turn out to portend important events.
This search for trends -- and grasping at straws -- was viciously lampooned by the wonderful writer Calvin Trillin in his novel "Floater," a quarter-century ago. Trillin had been on one of the newsmagazines and he made up a story conference where a researcher reported that there had been two incidents of people drowning in Marin County hot tubs. The somnolent editor snapped awake. "Is that a trend," he asked, and assigned a reporter to deliver a story on the epidemic of hot tub drownings.
And so it is 30 years later. The Times finds one or two examples of Arab-American supporters of Bush and transforms a couple of anomalies into a front-page "scoop."
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