Trend: Trends

By Ken Silverstein

“Carol,” Becker said, “do you actually think there's a trend for wearing two-thirds of a stocking in Los Angeles?”

“Not really,” she said. “I figure that Sicola in Los Angeles hasn't sent in any back-of-the-book suggestions for a while and was getting pressure from Barnett out there and has a girlfriend who wears two-thirds stockings, or would if there were any, and made the suggestion.”

That scene comes from Floater , Calvin Trillin's 1980 comic novel about life at a newsweekly. After re-reading the novel, I did a Lexis-Nexis search for the term “latest trend” in major newspapers and found 260 instances in the last three months alone. Unlike their forebears of 1980, journalists now use computers, and they're less likely to have severe drinking problems, but the spurious journalistic tradition of the “trend piece” is as popular now as it was then. Trend pieces are a main example of why modern newspapers are so often irrelevant.

Let's look at a few recent examples.

Trend pieces, I've found, tend to exhibit the following traits:

1. Sketchy, anecdotal evidence purported to demonstrate that the trend in question has captured the public imagination.
2. Bland testimony from an “average” man or woman who exemplifies the trend, or from someone with a business interest in the trend.
3. Hack writing by a desperate reporter under deadline.

Take a look at the personal bobbleheads story. According to the article, Iowa bobblehead-maker Bryan Guise (a man with a clear stake in promoting the notion that his bread-and-butter product is all the rage) “won't say how many he makes beyond ‘quite a few.’” In addition to Mr. Guise, the AP cites “[a]t least two other companies, in California and Illinois, [that] sell individual, custom-made bobbleheads.” That's a trend? The Christmas tree story in the Miami Herald quotes the owner of Christmastreeforme.com as saying that “sales are pretty decent overall.” This is evidence?

Jack Shafer at Slate.com regularly debunks trends; see, for example, this column on “pharm parties,” where revelers are said to receive bags of random pills, often “called trail mix.” But there's no way one person can catalogue it all; there are just too many journalists with too many column inches to fill in newspapers around the world. (In 2032, I'm sure, someone else will write a column just like this one, pointing out that just because a few people have used gene-splicing technology to grow third arms, those few extra arms do not a trend make.)

P.S. Here's the end of that scene in Floater:

“Exactly the way I figured it,” Becker said. “So here's what will happen . . .We send the queries on two-thirds stockings to the bureaus and the stringers. The junior guy at the bureau will get the query and, trying to show what a tiger he is, he'll find some people wearing two-thirds stockings or he'll invent a couple to keep the bureau chief happy. Sicola, I assure you, will come up with a designer who thinks two-thirds stockings are absolutely the latest thing, and who'll take credit for having invented them. The stringers are paid by the word, and you can't write many words about not being able to find any two-thirds stockings. So they'll find some. Then we'll take all of those reports and write a nice little fifty-liner out of them, and people will read it, and then people will start wearing two-thirds stockings. So everything will be just as we said it was.”