The Temptations of the Journalistic Outlier
Journalists love to illustrate their stories with unrepresentative examples to add drama. It's a bad habit.
This morning, the journalist Charlotte Clymer called BS on Wolf Blitzer of CNN, who was using a gas station where the prices were far higher than they are at neighboring stations to illustrate high gas prices.
I have noticed this same thing in Los Angeles for years. There is a single station, located on Alameda Street across from Union Station (and conveniently, in Downtown LA and easily accessible to local media) where gas prices are always at least $1 more than anywhere else in town. It is located here. There’s another one at Olympic and Fairfax that does the same thing- both of them are pushing $6 a gallon right now. The rest of LA is at about $4 to $4.50.
The thing is, that one gas station on Alameda Street shows up in numerous news stories about gas prices in Los Angeles. This is not an accident, nor is it an accident that Wolf Blitzer chose the gas station he chose in DC. (Respondents in Clymer’s thread pointed to examples in San Francisco as well.) You see, journalists have this bad habit.
The habit arises in stories that are illustrated by anecdotes rather than by data. When a journalist reports a data story, reputable statistics (or at least statistics the journalist thinks are reputable) are usually used. So a story about inflation might report the latest CPI numbers or some other inflation measure. And most journalists adhere to reasonable standards on this sort of story, usually reporting numbers from reputable agencies, reporting if there is disagreement about the number among reliable sources, etc.
But when doing anecdotal reporting (which, to be clear, is a reasonable and important form of journalism), the standards often get thrown out the window in favor of the most extreme possible means of making the point. That’s what happens, over and over again, in gas price stories. The underlying journalism is almost always legitimate- interviewing drivers who are ticked off about the price increases, reporting on the supply chain bottlenecks or Middle East political situations that are the cause of the problem, etc. But the media just can’t resist going to the station that they know is the most expensive in town so they can get that dramatic number that is way higher than whatever the readers or viewers last paid for gas.
I used to call this the Video Rental Records principle, after a quirk in the law. In the 1980’s, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court and liberal activists saw a potential threat to Roe v. Wade, they exhaustively investigated Bork, including obtaining his video rental records. This caused bipartisan outrage, which resulted in a federal statute protecting the privacy of video rental records. In contrast, many other forms of private information had not been protected by federal statute.
And this created a media talking point that we heard over and over again in the ensuing decades. Whenever someone proposed privacy legislation, they would always use the spin “for heaven’s sake, your video rental records are more protected than X”, without any mention of the specific political context that resulted in this. The protection of video rental records was an outlier, but it was frequently portrayed as if it was the baseline of privacy protection and whatever other issue didn’t measure up to it.
When journalists do this, it’s bad journalism. Journalists have an obligation to portray the world to their readers and viewers the way it really is, and deliberately picking the outlier to illustrate a story misleads readers and viewers in the exact same way that deliberately reporting only the one economic statistic that is not in line with all the others without informing the readers of the consensus would mislead them. Yet for some reason, the latter would be a big no-no in journalism but journalists knowingly go back to that Chevron station across the street from Union Station, time after time. They should stop.