Bert Archer
On Wed., Nov. 9, a sex-related virus was released into a well-populated room in Washington, D.C. Within eight hours, it had made it into the computers of newsrooms across the continent, and by the early hours on Thursday, it was spreading through the streets of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Detroit, Boston, L.A., Dayton, Denver and at least 70 other cities, towns and boroughs.
The people responsible for releasing it call themselves the Kaiser Family Foundation, but they’re only partially to blame. It was the other people in the room, the ones who took it with them to their respective offices and home to their loved ones, who set the wheels in motion for its rapid, Hot Zone-like proliferation.
The Kaiser Family Foundation probably sounds vaguely familiar to you, because chances are, if you were reading any Thursday newspapers or watching Wednesday evening’s news broadcasts, you were infected, too. And it probably wasn’t the first time. In fact, the more you’re exposed to this particular kind of virus, the less likely you’ll be able to build up an immunity.
Worried you may be infected? There’s a quick take-at-home test: Ask yourself, do you think there’s more sex on TV now than ever before? If you answered yes, I’m afraid you test positive.
It’s very much like something that Richard Dawkins called a “meme” — a transferable bit of received wisdom that acts like a gene in our culture. This particular meme was about sex on TV, but it could just as easily have been about urban violence, terrorism, or teen pregnancy. We have wonky notions about all of these things, perceptions that bear very little relationship to widely available facts. And yet we continue to believe, and pass on the belief, that violence is on the rise in our cities, terrorism is a clear and present danger, teen pregnancy is reaching epidemic proportions, and there is more explicit sex on TV than ever before.
The reasons we started believing these things are murky and complicated. But the reason we continue to believe them is straightforward: News, and the way we read, watch and listen to it, feeds our fears and our pessimism.
Michael Moore made a convincing case in Bowling For Columbine that fear sells, so when an organization like the Kaiser Foundation issues a report that says there are double the number of sex scenes on TV now than there were seven years ago, TV and newspapers sit up and take notice.
The Kaiser report defined a sex scene as anything involving discussions of sex, discussions of abstinence, and kissing, as well as the more obvious stuff. It also found that depictions of intercourse — which constitutes many people’s definition of sex — were actually down since 2002.
Wire-service stories — which are what most Canadian TV stations and newspapers rely on for coverage of studies out of Washington, D.C., because they’ve closed their foreign bureaus to save money — indicated as much. But the stories were still sent to newsrooms with headlines like “What’s on TV? A lot of sex, says report.”
The report also indicated that, although TV shows aimed at teens have more of these so-called sex scenes, fewer teens are actually watching them. Yet the Toronto Sun's story still ran under the vivid headline, “TV rams sex at kids.”
There is, of course, a problem with rank irresponsibility like the Sun's, but even the more temperate treatments of this particular bit of wire copy were easily misread. With glaring headlines about sex in our living rooms doubling, and lead paragraphs talking about desperate housewives having sex with their teenage gardeners on dining room tables, caveats like the one about Kaiser’s idiosyncratic definition of sex tended to get washed away.
The papers are being technically responsible by providing the relevant facts and context, but a combination of the way editors write headlines and photo captions and the way we read our newspapers conspires to feed these memes of ours. We pay far more attention to headlines than to the main text of the story, for one thing, and when we encounter something that seems to corroborate a notion we already hold — especially if it’s of a hell-in-a-handbasket sort, like violence in our streets and sex on TV and the Internet — we tend to file it away as supporting evidence, no matter what mitigating facts or counterarguments are put forward.
We could blame the papers for not funding their bureaus and writing those dastardly headlines. But that would be hypocritical: We’re not buying as many papers as we once did, so they don’t have as much money as they once did. And we like those headlines.
Which means the answer really lies with us. The value of newspapers over TV news is all those words. I know, so much to do, so little time. But as my Grade 8 vocab workbook told me, words are important. A typical single-column article in a newspaper has more information than your average lead evening news story. There is lots of stuff under those headlines, and it is useful as a vaccine against these info-viruses that, in turn, lead to concerned parents worrying needlessly about their kids.
There are enough real things to worry about. We can choose to leave the fake stuff out.
Bert Archer is an editor at the Toronto Star. He has his own blog.
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