HOME | BIO | MUSIC | JOURNEYS BY DJ | STUDIO BLOG | POLITICAL BLOG | BOOKING INFO | CONTACT

More and more often, I've noticed news reports using the term "baby boomers" in ways that just don't seem to make sense. Take, for example, this article about school enrollment in today's New York Times. Here's the lead:

STERLING, Va., Aug. 25 — Some 55 million youngsters are enrolling for classes in the nation’s schools this fall, making this the largest group of students in America’s history and, in ethnic terms, the most dazzlingly diverse since waves of European immigrants washed through the public schools a century ago.

Millions of baby boomers and foreign-born parents are enrolling their children, sending a demographic bulge through the schools that is driving a surge in classroom construction.

As a thirty-something child of baby boomer parents myself, I have to say I find stories like this quite odd. I've always understood the term "baby boomer" to refer to someone born in the immediate years after WWII, and who therefore came of age during the 1960's and 1970's. Now... clearly there's some debate over what the precise definition of "baby boomer" is, but I think we can all agree that if you push the term too far you render it meaningless. At the very least, I would hope we can agree that a generation cohort cant be defined in such a way that a parent and their child would fall in the same group.

But more and more often, that seems to be happening. The bulk of today's article, for example, details how exploding school enrollment is leading to a new wave of school construction. But I don't see how that can possibly be attributed to baby boomers, particularly if we're talking about primary schools. Or if, as is the case here, we are talking about projections reaching well into the next decade:

In projections published last year, the federal Department of Education said the nation’s elementary and secondary enrollments would grow, on average, by about 200,000 students annually, reaching 56.7 million in 2014. The enrollment trends would be uneven, regionally, with schools in the Northeast and Midwest losing students, on average, and those in the South and West growing, the department said.

For this to be the result of a new wave of enrollment of baby boomer children, you'd have to include people born in the 1970's in the baby boomer demographic. And that's obviously absurd. How can I, the child of a baby boomers myself, be considered to be in the same demographic group as my parents?

All of which makes me ask yet again... why are journalists so damn lazy? If you're going to write an article attempting to analyze something, shouldn't you at least give a little bit of thought to what you are going to say? I mean, if they can't get easy concepts like this right, what hope can we have for their reporting on more complex issues like nuclear non-proliferation or global climate change?