Some ‘Truths’ Cry Out For Reality Check

Sitting on the subway the other evening, I found myself pushed against the window between two pleasant, well-dressed gentlemen - one sitting beside me, the other in front on a seat facing sideways - discussing the NFL playoffs. It is that time of year again. On they went about whether the Redskins, if they beat the Giants, might be eligible to go into the first round against Detroit, assuming Philadelphia beats Denver, or Chicago loses to Miami in the second round, and the Redskins can rotate so-and-so for such-and-such in the dee-fense - and so on.

Unfortunately, I had nothing to read and so was obliged to stare across the aisle or into the middle distance (since the window looked out on the underground wall) while pretending not to listen to their learned analysis. Part of me wanted to get up and move to another car, but that would have been needlessly rude since they were, after all, doing nothing objectionable. Indeed, they might well have assumed I yearned to join the conversation.

The playoffs, I thought to myself, lead inexorably to the Super Bowl, and that crucial thought, in my state of desperation, blocked out the sound of their voices. In my reverie, I recalled it was once received wisdom in the press that Super Bowl Sunday was the worst day of the year in America for domestic violence. Male football fans, presumably full of rage and testosterone, were alleged to beat their wives and girlfriends in record numbers on that day, sending thousands of women to the nation’s emergency rooms.

Like Christmas depression and Fourth of July fireworks safety, this was a perennial news story - inspiring more than a few prescriptive editorials - until one reporter, Ken Ringle of The Washington Post, decided to probe its background. What he found is there is no evidence whatsoever for the assertion there is an epidemic of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday. It was merely a convenient invention for people who don’t like football, or men, or probably both. Even the psychologist customarily cited for statistics complained to Ringle her work was persistently distorted and misquoted by feminists and journalists.

Now, another reporter, Delia M. Rios in The American Journalism Review, has taken the time to examine another socio-journalistic myth. On the night Ellen DeGeneres’ television character revealed herself to be a lesbian, I couldn’t resist watching the ABC News “tie-in” feature on “Prime Time Live.” Right after she finished her interview with DeGeneres, co-host Diane Sawyer looked thoughtfully into the camera, lowered her voice and said the following: “As we close, we’re going to repeat a government statistic: a gay teenager is some three times as likely to attempt suicide as another teenager. Ellen DeGeneres has said, whatever happens to her, tonight’s broadcast was in part to hold onto them.”

Only in America, of course, does redemption come from sitcom characters.

But Delia Rios, to her great credit, decided to search a little deeper than the empathetic Diane Sawyer. And she detected a familiar pattern. Not only was the dubious suicide statistic routinely repeated by the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, but so was its corollary: Homosexual teenagers may account for as much as 30 percent of the some 5,000 youth suicides annually recorded in America.

Rios found not only is the 30 percent figure wildly inaccurate, but by a remarkable feat of peeling away accumulated layers of misinformation, she discovered it was conjured out of thin air by a San Francisco social worker named Paul Gibson. Gibson had done no original research but merely presumed that since gay and lesbian teenagers account for a certain number of attempted suicides, they must constitute a third of all actual suicides.

Of course, there is a significant difference between suicide and attempted self-destruction, but that distinction was lost on Gibson, whose fanciful statistic found its way unchallenged into a 1989 U.S. Health and Human Services Department report on teen suicide.

Since then, the federal government has made statistical amends. In 1994, it convened a panel of experts from the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Psychological Association, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Association of Suicidology, as well as gay and lesbian advocacy and service groups, to investigate the matter. Their conclusion: “There is no population-based evidence that sexual orientation and suicidality are linked in some direct or indirect manner.”

Homosexual teenagers are no more likely to kill themselves than heterosexual youths.

Will this put an end to such spurious statistics, or prompt well-intentioned journalists to ask a few questions? The chances, I suspect, are probably as good as the Redskins’ of playing in the next Super Bowl.

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