Fools--and the Press--Rush In

In their obsessive quest to explain “how the world has changed forever” since Sept. 11, journalists and prognosticators have issued the following proclamations:

* Irony and cynicism are dead. (Time magazine, Newsday)

* No, wait. Irony and cynicism are alive. (New York Times, Boston Globe)

* Gun sales are booming. (Chicago Tribune)

* Gun sales are normal. (Daily Herald of suburban Chicago)

* Luxury cars are flying out of dealer showrooms. (Dallas Morning News)

* Luxury car sales are sputtering. (USA Today, National Post)

* America is undergoing a spiritual revival. (L.A. Daily News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

* The widely touted revival is a bust. (New York Times, Associated Press)

And that’s just for openers. In recent weeks, commentators have also declared trends for everything from canary sales and quilting habits to bowling participation and La-Z-Boy recliner sales.

Apparently, something in the genetic makeup of journalists compels them to transform every catchy quote or behavioral blip into a nationwide trend.

Sometimes, these cultural yardsticks are accurate. But just as often they’re as prescient as Miss Cleo’s psychic hotline.

For example, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, several pontificators predicted that Americans would “pull up the drawbridges of [their] lives” and curtail activities away from home. Video rentals were supposed to skyrocket. “We’ll be doing the armored cocoon--air filters, germ filters, viral filters, stocking up on antibiotics,” said futurist Faith Popcorn in the Oct. 7 New York Daily News. “We’re staying home and it’s going to stick. When a trend is impacted by trauma, it bangs it in.... I see a 10-year effect.”

She miscalculated slightly. Within three weeks, movie theaters reported record attendance. “Several solid box-office weekends have confounded skeptics who believed that fear of terrorism and anthrax would keep audiences away,” noted the Hollywood Reporter.

Such are the perils of “instant trend” reporting.

Right after a big news event, “there’s a compulsion to analyze and tell viewers or readers what it means to them, even though the journalist can’t possibly know what it means to them,” said David J. Krajicek, a former Columbia University journalism professor and onetime media critic for APBNews .com. The old journalism axiom of “better right than first” has been replaced by “better to have analyzed first and been wrong than not to have analyzed at all,” he said.

TV is the worst offender, Krajicek said, but its mistakes are harder to trace once they flicker off the screen. Not so with print media.

One of the biggest goofs was the reported death of irony and black humor. Various commentators and publications--including a certain Los Angeles newspaper which shall remain nameless--suggested that cynicism and frivolity were a thing of the past.

It seemed logical enough. Late-night talk show hosts and satirical Web sites had turned somber. Black humor e-mails like the kind that followed the Challenger shuttle explosion and Princess Diana’s death were nowhere to be found.

But the comedy blackout didn’t last. “The forecasts mistook shock and grief for long-term cultural change,” said the New York Times.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who led the charge in announcing irony’s demise, later joked that he had been misunderstood: “Only a fool would declare the end of irony. I said it was the end of the age of ironing,” he told the Washington Post.

Another dubious trend is the “comeback” of bowling. To hear the New York Times tell it, Sept. 11 sparked “a resurgence of interest in the sport as families and friends look for bonding activities.”

If so, it’s the third bowling “comeback” this year. Comebacks were declared in May by the Los Angeles Times and in July by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and L.A. Daily News.

Perhaps bowling’s rebirth owes more to clever PR than Sept. 11. The same might be said of reports that Christian music sales soared after the terrorist attacks. Prompted by a press release from the Christian Music Trade Assn., articles appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Associated Press saying a shift in the national mood had fueled a run on Christian CDs after Sept. 11--up 23% from a year ago.

But the press release was arguably misleading. It turns out that Sept.11 was also the arrival date for new CDs from blockbuster Christian artists Michael W. Smith and P.O.D., the latter with a large secular following. Another boost came Sept. 25 when Christian superstar Steven Curtis Chapman issued a new CD.

In contrast, a year ago the Christian music industry was limping through its first sales slump in five years, apparently caused by a lack of new CDs.

Despite such missteps, trend stories aren’t inherently bad, Krajicek said: “Being fresh and having your eyes open is a good thing.... Informed trend reporting can be smart and useful.”

Case in point: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution discovered that New Yorkers were snapping up canaries after Sept. 11 as a hedge against poison-gas attacks. In the past, canaries were taken into coal mines to detect methane gas. Because of their size, the birds would succumb first, enabling miners time to escape. Alas, the canary system wouldn’t do much good in a citywide gas attack. Unlike a mine shaft, it’s too large an area to flee. “I like the canary article,” Krajicek said. “If it’s true, it’s interesting.”

So, what’s the difference between a clever trend story and a bad one? “Thought, time, consideration and good sources,” Krajicek said.

But even then, trends can be tough to decipher. When La-Z-Boy announced an “unexpected” spurt in recliner sales this fall, some saw it as evidence that people were staying home to “cocoon.” But others theorized the jump had more to do with the start of football season and a $50-million ad blitz launched in July.

*

Nailing down a trend in gun sales has proved particularly thorny. In California and several other states, post-Sept. 11 gun purchases were way up. In Massachusetts, they were slightly down. And in Illinois, it depended on which newspaper you read.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the state ran 50 more background checks per day during September than during the same period a year ago. But the Daily Herald called the increase illusory. After examining figures from the past five years, the paper concluded that although this year’s numbers might surpass last year’s, they would be roughly equal to “every prior September since 1997.”

The Daily Herald also quoted spokesmen from the National Shooting Sports Foundation and two of the nation’s largest gun retailers (Wal-Mart and Kmart) saying there was no significant increase in gun or ammo sales during September. (Kmart and Wal-Mart officials told The Times that gun sales in October and November were also on par with last year.)

The New York Times reviewed similar statistics and reached a very different conclusion. In a Dec.16 article headlined “Steep rise in gun sales reflects post-attack fears,” the paper cited the same National Shooting Sports Foundation survey used by the Daily Herald. But whereas the Herald noted that half of all gun retailers in the survey reported no increase in sales, the Times mentioned only the 15% of retailers who had sales jumps of 25% or more in the days after Sept. 11.

Doug Painter, the shooting foundation’s executive director, said the truth is elusive: “It depends on how you interpret the facts.” Even FBI statistics are somewhat inconclusive. Although the number of background checks that the agency ran on would-be gun buyers jumped 11% in September and 22% in October over last year, it also rose slightly in August, before the attack. And the total background checks for 2001 are still lower than for 1999.

The bottom line: Although Sept.11 clearly pushed gun sales up, it’s impossible to know how much of the boost was from first-time gun buyers responding to terrorism, Painter said.

*

One hallmark of good journalism, said Krajicek, is digging past the conventional wisdom and statistics to see if contradictory information emerges.

Consider the “comfort food” phenomenon. Countless media outlets--including this one--have reported that stress and grief are causing a nationwide binge on ice cream, pizza, mashed potatoes, chocolate and similar fare. The stories cite anecdotal evidence and supermarket statistics showing jumps in the sale of pancake mix, peanut butter, creamed corn and other comfort foods. Is it true? A New York Times story joined the comfort-food bandwagon, but also threw in a countervailing view from Kelly Brownell, a psychologist who runs Yale University’s Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. Brownell said that although some people use food to soothe unpleasant feelings, most people eat less when under stress.

More skepticism came from restaurant owners interviewed by the Associated Press. They attributed any shift in people’s diets to the change in seasons.

“This whole comfort food thing may have been blown out of proportion,” said Matt Bell, a spokesman for ACNielsen, which tracks grocery sales. Bell now warns journalists to be careful about drawing inferences from store statistics. “It’s really difficult to assign reasons for the numbers.”

The only trend that’s certain is the trend to find more trends. It’s the nature of the journalism beast. Unfortunately, reporters “habitually work the short end of the temporal scale, which leads to emphatic pronouncements with short shelf lives,” said San Francisco Chronicle TV critic John Carman, writing in the Oct. 1 issue of Electronic Media. “For three weeks, we’ve tried to identify ways that Sept. 11 changed everything for all time. Or at least until November or December.”

The catch is that human nature isn’t easily altered, even by events as profound as 9-11. That’s why the articles on America’s newfound spiritual fervor soon gave way to articles on how church attendance and attitudes toward God were back to normal.

As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Which might explain why “America.01,” a TV program that examined how the nation has changed since Sept. 11, was canceled after two episodes and replaced by “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”