The news media does many silly things, of course.
If a politician refuses to even consider other opinions, we call them closed minded -- and then call them a waffler when they change their mind.
If someone is randomly injured/maimed/killed in a horrifying accident on video, it gets top play for week. Especially if they can use it to scare the crap out of everyone. (“A local man was injured in a gas explosion when he used a fire pit that had been built on top of a gas line.(1) FInd out if your yard is a cauldron of death waiting to kill you, tonight at 11.”)
If someone is named “Kardashian” they get coverage for doing everything but poop.
My personal favorite, however, is when someone on the media takes something that happens once, then twice, and then reports on every single following occurrence as if it’s the most amazing/horrifying/deady thing that ever happened.
The best example of this was the summer of 2001. Summer is always a slow time for news, so TV people are looking for something to hype. Shark attacks provided the answers. Every shark attack anywhere in America was suddenly covered as if “Jaws” had come to life. This, despite no evidence whatsoever that shark attacks were actually on the rise.(2)
Today, we call this kind of nonsense “tabloid television.”(3) Certainly, there have been other examples of it. The one that sticks in my craw from an LGBT standpoint, however, was back in 2005, when I suddenly began reading about women switching back and forth between lesbian and straight.
I saw it in USA Today: “More women — particularly those in their late teens and 20s — are experimenting with bisexuality or at least feel more comfortable reporting same-sex encounters.”(4) Pegging the number at about 11.5 percent, the National Center for Health Statistics, said women in college “experimented” at about double the rate of men.(5)
The possible reasons were numerous: to avoid diseases more commonly spread through sex with men, it was a rite of passage, or even that the label bisexuality had become a “badge of courage” on college campuses. (4) Whatever the cause or reason, I was suddenly of the mind the college girls everywhere were “switching teams,” as Seinfeld once put it.
No wonder I could never find a girl to date in college.
Like so many bandwagons the media jumps on, however, all might not have been as it appeared. About a decade after the survey that generated the numbers above, another survey was conducted, and it found something very different: “10 percent of women ages 22 to 44 with a bachelor's degree said they had had a same-sex experience, compared with 15% of those with no high school diploma.”(6)
No wonder I could never find a girl to date in high school.
The problem with these stories suddenly popping up everywhere is two-fold. First, it makes people think there’s a world out there that doesn’t really exist. No, people thinking there’s more lesbians than there are isn’t the same as an irrational fear of being eaten by a shark. But there’s a certain value in the truth, and when the media distorts that truth, it’s pretty rare something good results.
Second, however, and connecting to the first, is that when a hyped up “truth” destroys a real one, everyone loses. Take the example of women “switching teams” well beyond the college years.
A decade of research by the University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond and others demonstrates that women have greater “erotic plasticity… (and that) women are far more likely than men to ‘report remarkably late and abrupt onset of same-sex sexuality, often after heterosexual marriage.’”(7)
In other words, what young college women are supposedly experiencing, many older women actually are. Yet these older women, seen through a lens constructed by mass media, may not be taken seriously. Their issues of plasticity lumped in with those who start a conversation, "Well once...in college."
The truth is no one really knows why many older women go through this. Heck, the survey data may be flawed, as it may just be that men don’t want to admit it.(4)
Still, in studies, more women than men are sexually aroused by images of both men and women.(7) Enough of a reason that many scientists can say only that “the formation of this slippery spectrum itself… most needs explaining.”(7)
Sounds good to me. Just don’t release the results during a slow news week.(8)
References:
1) KOMONews.com: Fire pit built over natural gas line explodes
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Fire-pit-built-over-natural-gas-line-explodes-258898541.html
2) Too bad none of them were named “Kardashian.”
3) Wikipedia: Summer of the Shark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
4) USA Today: Health and Behavior
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-09-15-womenbisexuality_x.htm?csp=34
5) New York Times: Nationwide Survey Includes Data on Teenage Sex Habits
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/national/16sex.html?ex=1284523200&en=a80eccce1c614aae&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&_r=0
6) Do All Women "Experiment" With Lesbianism In College? Not Even Close
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/219616.php
7) Why Are There Gay Women?
http://www.livescience.com/33992-gay-women.html
8) Any week free of sharks or Kardashians