Newsweek's Apology Too Little, 20 Years Too Late

"We were wrong!"

You almost never see these words on the cover of a major magazine, but on June 5, Newsweek said just that.

The magazine headlined, in boxcar type, "20 years ago, Newsweek predicted that a single, 40-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married."

Over a photograph of a bride and groom, the magazine admitted its 1986 story had been incorrect and titled its new cover piece "Rethinking the Marriage Crunch."

Newsweek deserves a bouquet for its story. Half the flowers should be roses, for admitting in such a public way that the terrorist story turned out to be utterly bogus. The other half should be stinkweed, because a lot of people knew full well at the time that the notion was laughable. Why did the correction take so long?

The "killed by a terrorist" story proved irresistible to the U.S. media, and it's a classic case of how flawed information gets repeated so often it turns into popular gospel. How did this all come about?

In 1985, three Harvard-Yale researchers (Neil Bennett, David Bloom and Patricia Craig) published a "Marriage Patterns in the United States" study. Not, on its face, a real headline grabber. But embedded in the study was what appeared to be very bad news about women, a commodity that always sells like hot cakes.

"Are These Women Old Maids?" screeched People magazine, in a headline over pictures of Diane Sawyer, Sharon Gless, Donna Mills and Linda Ronstadt. People warned "Most single women over 35 can forget about marriage." (While Newsweek used 40 as the age of doom, most other publications set it at 35.)

Dire predictions go to Hollywood

Before long, there was hardly a female in the nation who hadn't heard the dire predictions about women who delay marriage. One of Nora Ephron's single women in her 1993 "Sleepless in Seattle" cited the terrorist "fact."

But even at the time the researchers said their work was being wildly misinterpreted.

Most women, they noted, tended to marry guys two or three years older. But during the baby boom years, each year brought an increasing number of babies; so the baby crop born in 1955 was larger than that of l953, for example. So a woman born in '55 looking for a '53 husband was fishing in waters that contained fewer men.

But the man shortage, as Katha Pollitt pointed out in The Nation in September of 1986, was "really an older man shortage, and a temporary one at that."

The dire scenario for single women was exactly this: The 35-year-old woman who insisted that she would marry only a man two years her senior could have faced a shortage.

Viewed in this limited statistical prism, the white, college-educated woman's likelihood of marrying was only 1 in 20.

But of course, that number was meaningless. Why should it have been assumed that such a woman would have scorned a man her own age? Or a 34-year-old man. Or a 28-year-old man?

As it turned out, there were no dire consequences for women who chose to marry when they were in their 30s or 40s. There was no basis at all for the massive coverage the national media gave to the story.

Another 'Crack of the backlash'

The study on which Newsweek based its cover article bore little relation to how men and women behave in real life and was hyped into a phony "trend." Pollitt hit the nail on the head when she said that the "media coverage of the study, if not the study itself, is just another crack of the backlash. Women can't have it all, women must choose. A career or a husband."

One reason an obscure demographic study acquired such long "legs" as a news story, Newsweek admits, is that the magazine came up with the catchy "killed by a terrorist" line, which was not in the academic study.

The line was first written as a joke in a memo from correspondent Pamela Abramson.