Media Mythmaking 101: Katie Couric’s “The 411 on Teens and Sex”

On January 26, 2005, NBC aired a special report hosted by Katie Couric titled “The 411 on Teens and Sex.” It was, as is often the case with such programs, billed as “a program every parent should see” and promised parents shocking information on the “secret lives of teenagers.”

A close examination of this NBC special shows it to be a good case study in media hype and mythmaking: Taking findings and statistics on a topic that are actually unremarkable and using hyperbole and bias to dress a report up as an insightful examination of an alarming yet overlooked trend.

NBC and traditionally uncool Katie Couric were clearly straining to appear cool. The use of the slang phrase “411” in the title was a feeble and transparent bid for youth acceptance. At picturesque Key Biscayne, Florida, twenty teens between 13 and 17 from diverse backgrounds gathered to be part of a weekend jaunt to include frank sexual discussions with Katie Couric. What teens wouldn’t flock to tell a morning show anchor almost three times their age about what they do in the backs of cars?

Given the show’s title and reality TV style premise, I half expected Couric to use words like “phat” and “def” in her questioning of the collected teens. I could just imagine the questions coming through that famously perky smile: “So, like, Mark, dude: if you hook up with some fresh chick, and she’s all, like, ‘Let’s do it,’ are you down with that?”

There’s of course nothing wrong with interviewing teens about sex, but much of the discussion was superficial, and the teens went beyond personal views and into rumormongering. One girl talked of stories she overheard in her school’s hallways about some other girls’ sexual experiences. A male teen recounted a story he heard: “A horrific one [story] at my school was, supposedly, during gym class, a bunch of guys had gone into the bathroom with one girl....” (Or, "One time, at band camp....") Interviews are fine, but anecdotes are not journalism. Instead of trying to clear up teenage sex rumors or put such anecdotes in context, the program seemed to embrace them.

Couric asked a roomful of teens if they know what “hooking up” is or if they have heard of “friends with benefits.” Later in the show, Couric asked teens trite questions like, “Do you ever feel like you’re growing up too fast?” Experts were then brought out to dispense such sage parenting advice as, “Ask your teen questions about their lives... and listen to what they say.” In sum, most of the show stuck to a well-worn script: Adult hand-wringing about kids today.

The NBC / People magazine Poll

The show touted an NBC News / People magazine poll of 1,000 teens aged 13 to 16. “Almost every parent has heard some shocking story, but we wanted to get the truth behind the rumor mill,” Couric said. “So along with People magazine, NBC News commissioned an unprecedented national poll...Using scientific methods, the survey provides some of the first real numbers on the sexual attitudes and behaviors of young teens.”

Hold on. Where did this statement come from? Couric and the show’s producers seem to suggest that their telephone poll of a thousand teens (frankly, not a terribly large sample size) provides “some of the first real numbers” on teen sex, dismissing decades of studies and dozens or hundreds of polls and surveys. If NBC and Couric really think that they have somehow done pioneering sociological research on teen sex with a poll of a thousand teens taken in 2004, they must be reading too much of their own PR copy.

Ironically, the poll results often deflated the show’s theme and suggested that, as the saying goes, the kids are alright. Couric managed to dance around the fact that the statistics actually contradicted or undercut the show’s premise that most teen behavior is wild or shocking. For example: “Our survey shows that seven out of ten teens are not sexually active and have pretty much stuck to kissing.” So the vast majority, almost three-quarters, aren’t sexually active? What about all the hype at the beginning of the show, the “shocking” revelations?

Only 14 percent of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds said they are sexually active, rising to 41 percent by age sixteen. Is this the crisis? That 86 percent of thirteen- and fourteen- year olds are notsexually active? And it is really so “shocking,” as Couric puts it, that at age 16, far less than half of teens have had sex? How does this compare to other countries, or to the teens’ parent’s generation? What is the journalistic context to help us understand these numbers? We don’t know, because Couric didn’t bother to look into it. Thus there’s no way for the audience to tell whether or not this is an alarming increase or perhaps even a decrease. Couric finally admitted that “I’m as confused and overwhelmed as you might be.”

Throughout the program, Couric adopted a condescending tone of mock modesty with both the teens and their parents. Showing either disconcerting naivete or journalistic feint, she pretended, for example, that “friends with benefits” (casual sex, for those of you who need the 411) was a novel phenomenon.

In fact, in the mid-1990 and earlier, sex experts such as Dr. Judy Kuriansky and others were discussing the same thing, only then it was called “buddy sex.” Twenty years before that, it was known as “free love.” Whatever you want to call it, the phenomena is neither novel nor unique to teenagers. Nor, apparently, is it on the rise. Wendy Shalit’s 2000 book A Return to Modesty discussed surveys of college freshmen that found “record low support for casual sex.”

A report issued December 11, 2004, by the National Center for Health Statistics found that fewer American teens are having sex than in the past, and those who do are more likely than their predecessors to use contraception. The survey found that among girls aged 15 to 17, the percentage who had intercourse dropped from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. And births to teenagers are at a sixty-year low; births to high-school age girls dropped to the lowest rate in forty years. Of course these facts weren’t brought up in “The 411 on Teens and Sex,” as they would undermine the show’s manufactured newsworthiness. NBC can’t get parents and teens to tune in unless they offer some cause for alarm.

Couric Blows It

Katie Couric seemed especially interested, almost obsessed, with oral sex. It was on her mind. It was one of the reasons she felt the need to produce and host this television special. “I was personally shocked how casually young people treat oral sex and how it’s considered much less intimate than intercourse,” Couric told the Associated Press. It was one of the show’s highlights, and an entire twelve-minute segment was devoted to the topic. Following one teen girl’s musings about the foreplay, Couric intoned with exaggerated horror: “Oral sex? The new ‘third base’? Yikes!”

Teens were asked about it, and, interestingly, many of them thought that both the incidence and the concern (read: much of the program’s theme) were overstated. “It’s not as common as everyone thinks it is,” one teen said.

As before, the NBC / People magazine poll largely debunked the show’s own myths and pretensions. Survey says: 12 percent of teens between the ages of thirteen and sixteen had oral sex. That’s right, just over one in ten. So that means that the vast majority, 88 percent of teens who have reached sixteen, have not had oral sex. And of the few who have, most of them do not do so casually: Poll results found that 85 percent of teens believe that “it is important to be in love before having oral sex.” Is this statistic, this “window into teen life,” really so shocking? “The 411 on Teens and Sex” seems to think so.

Couric joins in the chorus of concerned parents, suggesting that oral sex is more common than ever in our schools, yet she provides no evidence for that. In fact, three-quarters of the way through the broadcast, she admits that “We’re not sure if oral sex among teens is on the rise; it’s not a trend that has been closely followed.”

Hold on, what? Let’s run that one by again:

“We’re not sure if oral sex among teens is on the rise; it’s not a trend that has been closely followed.”

This is a brave and startling admission, given that the tone and language of the program’s previous forty-five minutes certainly seemed to suggest that oral sex is on the rise and that parents should be concerned.

The show discussed the early sexualization of teen culture-- the magazine images, the sexy music videos, the so-called Britney-ization of the culture. “The 411 on Teens and Sex” somehow managed to entirely avoid at least one important issue in any discussion of teen sexuality. Simply pointing out that teen girls are having sex (or are being exposed to sexual images) at younger ages than their parents only tells half the story. It’s also true that girls’ bodies are becoming sexually mature at younger and younger ages. The average age of the onset of menarche (menstrual periods) has dropped significantly in the last fifty years. The reason why is unknown, but several culprits have been suggested, including juvenile obesity and environmental contaminants that mimic bodily hormones. But music videos and sexy ad campaigns (the famous shampoo ad that promises “a totally organic experience” is singled out) are surely irrelevant.

The 411 on the Teen Sex Hype Scare

"The 411 on Teens and Sex" was a tempest in a teapot, only the latest in a series of “news” reports over the past five years or so that have tried to sell newspapers and gain audience share by alarming parents. Another example, this one from Time magazine, appears in my book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. Note the familiar media mythmaker pattern of emphasizing the negative for the sake of a story:

On November 5, 1999, Amy Dickinson, family columnist for Time, had good news to share with her readers: the National Center for Health Statistics concluded in a recent survey that girls ages 15 to 17 had the lowest birth rate in 40 years, and 80% of the decline in teen pregnancy was attributed to more birth control.

The decline was something to congratulate ourselves about; changing sexual behavior is notoriously difficult, and the news was a real achievement. But sure enough, Dickinson adhered to the old newsroom rule: let no good news go unblackened by some warning, to reassure the public that there are still problems to fix. Apparently desperate for bad news to taint the good, she looked hard and sure enough found something else to wring her hands about: oral sex.

She writes, “Anecdotes and news reports from around the country suggest that oral sex is currently in vogue among schoolkids. In a recent survey by Planned Parenthood, 10% of self-described virgins admitted having oral sex— some in their early teens.” Dickinson is really having to stretch here. She’s relying on anecdotes (we know how reliable those are; good for telling a story, very questionable for generalizing), and news reports— the same news reports that systematically and routinely exaggerate the severity of virtually every problem or crisis. The best she can do is quote a survey that says that one out of every ten virgins admitted having oral sex, “some in their early teens.” Translation: the vast majority of virgins surveyed, 90%, did not report that act, and of the few who did, most were in their mid or late teens. This is the crisis that Dickinson uses to cast a shadow over the much more robust, significant, and positive news.

I was actually surprised that Couric didn’t repeat the debunked “jelly bracelet” myth. The story, repeated by concerned parents and sloppy journalists, suggest that teens are using colored jelly bracelets to signal sexual availability to each other. Parents, teachers, and lawmakers across North America have been in an outraged frenzy about the imagined sexual behavior of their youth, and some schools have banned the bracelets. Yet this fear is unfounded; it is a myth, an urban legend. (For more on this urban legend, see the urban legends site at www.snopes.com)

All in all, “The 411 on Teens and Sex” was shoddy journalism, full of alarmist pronouncements that overshadowed the far more mundane realities. Couric said she became passionate about the need to discuss the subject after hearing “horror stories” of teens having sex at early ages. As it turns out, many of the stories Couric heard were untrue—not that she said that on the air. Katie Couric has never been a paragon of investigative journalism, but this “special” was a wasted opportunity. If Couric is sincere in her belief that the topic is important and deserves thoughtful analysis, she must be discouraged by how her NBC special turned out.