News Article Misleads

I saw a news story about this year's national retail Christmas sales today, and it really bothered me.  It seems like it's getting harder and harder to find news stories that are just that--news stories--rather than opinion pieces in the guise of news, or perhaps news stories, but, as in this case, presented in a slanted way that skews the meaning in a misleading direction.

The story that got my goat this morning was by Mae Anderson and Candice Choi of the Associated Press.  It paints a bleak picture of anemic holiday sales and a commercial disaster for retailers this Christmas season.  It starts, "Bargain-hungry Americans will need to go on a post-Christmas spending binge to salvage this holiday shopping season."  My goodness, that's terrible.  And I had been hearing before Christmas that things were looking good!  The article goes on, "...U.S. holiday sales so far this year have been the weakest since 2008, when the nation was in deep recession."  

After reading this I was wondering how much sales had dropped compared to last year.  So, after the distressing opening about merchants needing salvation and sales being weak, then slogging through several individual examples of shoppers in the stores after Christmas looking for deep discounts, I finally got to paragraph fourteen.  It states, "So far, holiday sales of electronics, clothing, jewelry and home goods in the two months before Christmas increased 0.7 percent compared with last year, according to the MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse report." 

What, sales increased?  As in, they sold more this year than last?  Objectively, that is not weak or worse.  It is better.  And what is more, the report is incomplete, with more data apparently still to come in.  In paragraph eighteen we read, "The National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, said Wednesday that it's sticking to its forecast for total sales for November and December to be up 4.1 percent to $586.1 billion this year."  So, despite the gloom and doom opening, we find out that sales are up, not down, and that the industry itself remains optimistic that when the final figures come in they will be much better yet.

So what on earth were the authors talking about?  Farther into paragraph eighteen they shed some light on this by writing, "That's more than a percentage point lower than the growth in each of the past two years, and the smallest increase since 2009 when sales were up just 0.3 percent." 

Now we see.  Instead of writing that Christmas sales in 2012 continued the upward trend of the past three years, though at a slower rate than the past two, which would have been accurate, we are told that business is dire and can only be "salvaged" by a last-minute "binge."  Terms like "salvaged" and "binge" conjure up images of disaster and manic behavior, a perfect picture of desperation before an impending calamity, rather than ongoing growth at a marginally lower level than the last couple of holiday seasons.

As an AP story, the item was picked up by ABC News and major papers across the country such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post and Houston Chronicle.  When consumers turn to news sources they need to be able to depend on unbiased information.  When they get slant in the guise of information, they are savvy enough to recognize that for what it is.  The more this happens the more it breeds cynicism among the public about the news in general.  Without accepted facts rational civic debate is impossible.  Opinion and analysis pieces have their places.  This blog is certainly one, for instance.  And like it, they need to be clearly labelled as such.