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Bogus Trend Story of the WeekThe Los Angeles Times on Southern California street racing.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Oct. 12, 2007, at 6:16 PM ET

One way newspapers indemnify themselves against charges that they've published a bogus trend story is by constructing ledes that essentially say this isn't a trend story because it's been going on for a long time.

The Los Angeles Times follows this course in Thursday's (Oct. 11) Page One story "Street racing takes on a deadly new form." The triple-bylined piece acknowledges at its start that young Los Angelinos were street racing well before the hot-rod fad of the 1950s. It concedes that despite spending "decades" trying to stop the racers, police are still "struggling to fight the practice."

But then, as the piece starts piling up body-count anecdotes—reporting that "nearly 100 people die each year in California as a result of illegal street racing"—it gently morphs into an unsubstantiated trend story about the changing face of street racing:

Detectives said they are increasingly seeing a particularly dangerous form of racing, called "cutting the gap"—impromptu speed contests in which racers weave in and out of traffic.

Note the imprecision of the detectives' testimony. If this dangerous form of racing is increasing, what's the measure? Don't look for it in the story. Also, if "nearly 100 people die each year in California as a result of illegal street racing," is the number going up or down? Again, don't look for it in the story.

After recounting another racing anecdote—one that took the life of Reyna De Leon—the story returns to its "increasingly" theme. The reporters write:

The type of race that killed De Leon is becoming increasingly common, police said.

Again, the piece provides no numbers, just the opinion of unnamed "police."

Cops can be terrific sources—as long as you don't care whether they know what they're talking about. This lesson seems to be lost on the Los Angeles Times. If the observation that types of racing are increasing is good enough to bear repeating, surely some sort of documentation exists to support it. Right?

The only surefire way to prove a trend's genuineness is to measure progress over time. The Times story sort of gets that, stating:

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
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