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Sex, Booze & Surveys: Journos Gone Wild
Richard Yoast, director of the AMA's Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Abuse, says his organization posted a correction on its Web site to note that this was not a nationwide random sample and should not have included a margin of error, as in standard polls. "In the future, we're going to be more careful," he says.
Yoast says some of the findings reflect only the 27 percent of the 644 respondents who said they had actually been on spring break, but the statistics highlighted in the AMA's press release make no distinction between those who have taken such trips and those who haven't. "We didn't report this as a scientific survey that was completely representative," Yoast says. "We were trying to find out what the female perspective on spring break is."
  Reporter Richard Engle, blogging about the life in Baghdad. (2003 Abc News Photo) |
The flawed methodology didn't stop CBS's "Early Show," NBC's "Today," CNN's "American Morning," "Fox & Friends" and countless other programs from reporting the findings, or dozens of newspapers from carrying an Associated Press story or their own pieces.
"It got picked up partly because it was sexy," says Zukin, who complained to the New York Times about a chart the paper ran on the findings. The Times later ran a correction.
There's little doubt that lots of women (not to mention men) misbehave on spring break. So, on occasion, do credulous journalists.
Blogging From Baghdad
NBC's Richard Engel, the longest-serving American television correspondent in Iraq, says blogging has become an important outlet for him.
"There are things that are incredibly difficult to report on television because of the security situation," he says from Baghdad. "Either we don't have the pictures or we're hearing reports from places that are too dangerous to travel to. And there's a lot of stress and tension here. I find it's cathartic to write about what I've seen."
Several months ago, Engel wrote about a bizarre experience he had standing outside the al-Hamra Hotel, home to many foreign journalists, after it had been bombed. As some birds tussled in a tree, the face of the suicide bomber -- just a piece of skin -- dropped from the leaves.
"I was looking at the person face to face who tried to kill all of us," Engel says. "I wasn't bothered at all. I thought, what's happened to our humanity?"
Last month, Engel blogged about an Iraqi friend who showed off a new cellphone -- which featured videos of an attack on U.S. troops and a suicide bomber's severed head. In Iraq, he wrote, "there's a growing taste for this new war porn."
"It's important for me to write about these things," Engel says. "If you just leave all of that inside, it has an impact."
Engel, who was an ABC freelancer, sneaked into Iraq illegally in early 2003 and hid in safe houses, enabling him to cover the U.S. invasion. Engel signed with NBC soon afterward. He landed an exclusive interview last week with Iraq's new prime minister, Nori al-Maliki.
