Sort of. Lynn over at Broadsheet has a great post (and follow-up) on Newsweek's "re-evaluation" of its 1986 story about marriage, Too Late for Prince Charming? (retch), which claimed that college-educated women who are still single at age 35 have only a 5 percent chance of ever getting married. Some researchers now put the odds at 40 percent.
Wonder if the editors at Newsweek sent Susan Faludi a note that said, "Whoops! Sorry! Our bad." Faludi (who isn't mentioned in the "update") debunked the original article in her 1991 book Backlash, which not only illustrated why a feminist movement was still necessary, but also proved that a feminist book could crack the bestseller list. Faludi wrote, "If anyone faced a shortage of potential spouses, it was men in the prime marrying years." Today Newsweek admits that, even in 1986-- before fertility treatments and "Sex and the City" made it OK to be over 35 and single-- a 40-year-old woman really had a 23 percent chance of marrying. I'm no statistician, but that's a bit higher than 5 percent.
I wonder if, 20 years from now, we can expect the New York Times to admit they had it all wrong about professional women "opting out." I'm not holding my breath.
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It’s more like Newsweek admits Newsweek is wrong. I remember that one; such statistical gamesmanship is perilously easy to do. It really doesn’t even deserve a debunking. The probability of X taking place is equal to Y. The chances of getting hit by lightning are greater than the chances for winning the lotto. Nevertheless people buy a lot of tickets and still go out in thunderstorms.
With regard to the "opt-out" piece, it was mercilessly mocked on TPMCafe and other blogs because the New York Times had published an article in 1980 saying the EXACT same thing. I believe one of the newsmagazines (The Nation, or Slate) actually went back and found some of the women interviewed in the 1980 piece who said they were going to be stay at home moms and actually they had been working the whole time, attributing their comments to the Times to youthful naivete.
Which just brings up the fact that the press often has no regard for facts when writing its stories. Its only goal is to generate interest/sell papers. What they do is come up with an idea for a story that they think fits into the popular preconcieved notions of "social trends," then they go and look for evidence of their hypothesis, ignoring anything that doesn't fit.
One of my friends is a professor of public opinion and one day receive a call from a local newspaper. She gave them a 20 minute interview where she said basically how the whole 'moral values' shlock from the 2004 election was overblown, and that moral values actually didn't play a larger role in 2004 than any other year. A week later, in the actual story, there was only one quote from her, and it was twisted to form the exact opposite of what she'd said. In fact the whole story was about the importance of moral values, the EXACT opposite of what she'd told the interviewer!
Being in an academic environment, I've talked to a lot of experts and professors on this type of thing and they say whenever they receive a call from a reporter, they just ask the reporter what quote the reporter is looking for and give it to them. The reporter doesn't care about the expert's actual opinion. He or she just wants a line that they can quote in a story that fits with their preconceived goals in writing the story.
Apparently the NYTimes thought that in the years 1980 and 2005 it was "cool" not to be a working woman and the public would gobble up the opt-out meme. Gee-- I wonder what could be responsible for that?
Where are the articles about the new social trend of women "opting out" of marriage? Apparently there aren't any reporters interested in squeezing that quote out of any experts.
As a biologist I see the same sort of thing with science reporting, by the way. Science writers want to make a big story out of a pretty mundane research paper, so they find a way to spin it and talk to a professor/ researcher until they hear what they want to hear. Next thing we know, it's national news and everyone's talking about something that was actually shoddy work. It's pretty disgusting.