John Leo, writing in U.S. News and World Report, points to some questionable coverage by the The New York Times of a Johns Hopkins study that, for all intents and purposes, tells us nothing new: kids in homes where mom keeps bringing in new live-in boyfriends don’t fare well socially. So what does the Times’ headline read? “Two Parents Not Always Best for Children, Study Finds.”

As Leo notes:

The problem is that the report used the word ‘parent’ to cover any any adult male living in the home with a mother and her child. These males ranged from a married biological father to a lover of the week briefly installed in the home by the mother. This blurring of the word ‘parent’ skews all the numbers on what is happening in the two-parent home, making intact families look unstable when the bulk of the instability comes from cohabitators, especially ‘churning’ ones with no particular commitment to the child. The report contains this sad little sentence: ‘It is possible that some partners may not be regarded as parent-figures by the caregiver and child.’ No kidding.

This kind of journalism really irks me. Today, a local Denver newscaster, in introducing a “Special Report” the station had put together on “rape in the Mile High City,” made the claim that “hundreds of thousands of rapes occur every year here in Colorado.” “Indeed,” he said, his face earnest and moist, “one happens every second.” Only moments later, however, a second reporter used the figure of 30 rapes per day — a figure quite a bit smaller than the 86,400 her collegue had just suggested.

I have no reason to believe these newscasters were politicizing rape, mind you. But the fact remains that such imprecision with facts has a real effect in the community. I eagerly await the first student I have who somberly reports that, in Denver alone, over 86,000 rapes happen every single day…

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