Why Does The NY Times Rely So Often On Single Anecdote Trend Pieces Not Supported By The Data?
A few months ago, we pointed to a NY Times “trend piece” on people so hooked on their gadgets that they get distracted. As we noted, the entire piece seemed to be based around a single anecdote of a guy who got distracted, and some scientific studies that don’t actually support the underlying thesis of the article. I’ve noticed that this formula is all too common in NY Times tech trend pieces. We saw it more recently in the NY Times piece we wrote about claiming that cable TV was winning against the internet by purposely keeping authorized content offline, based off of a single anecdote of a guy who ditched his cable subscription only to go back a year later… just a day or so before the stats came out showing that people are actually ditching their cable connections. It appears that others are catching on to this rather questionable form of “reporting” by the NY Times. Jack Shafer over at Slate is calling the NY Times out for a similar piece which was so ridiculous that the article i
