Last month, the New York Times ran a sensationalistic article on the premise that for the first time a majority of American women were living without a spouse. I blogged about the faulty statistics used in the article, including the inclusion of 15 to 17-year-old girls, 90 percent of whom live at home with their parents, as well as women whose husbands are in the military serving overseas or were out of town on business when the census was conducted. Subtract those women and suddenly there’s no majority and no story.
Now, the Times own public editor, Bryan Calame, has caught up with the story and agrees that the methodology was faulty, the statistics flawed, and the story promoted unreasonably.
It was discouraging to find yet another article with an unusual angle that didn’t seem to encounter many skeptical editors as it made its way to the front page. “At the Page One meeting there was agreement that the story was especially newsworthy because of the for-the-first-time-more-living-alone-than-with-a-spouse angle,” Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, wrote to me in an e-mail. “No questions about the methodology or age categories were discussed.”
It used to be that the big media could publish these sensationalistic stories pushing agendas and based on tissue-thin premises without contradiction, but for the media-consuming public that pays attention to the blogosphere there’s now a massive body of fact-checkers to double-check everything they say.
Technorati Tags:marriage, media bias, New York Times, women
Another day—Another NY TIMES-BOSTON GLOBE lie uncovered or admitted!