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Last Sunday there was a sudden rise in domestic violence because it was Super Bowl day. Or so goes the story.

Does it happen? Sorting out the facts is difficult. Many domestic abuse counselors and shelter programs say it is true, others disagree. In response to the claim, in 1993 NBC aired an anti-abuse public service announcement as part of its Super Bowl programming. Some were so offended by the notion that a backfire started. Ken Ringle in the Washington Post claimed the research did not support the claim and that it was promoted by "causists" with a hunger for camera time.

Laura Flanders of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which helped get NBC to use the PSA, responded that she had never claimed a high violence rate on Super Bowl day and that "In fact, FAIR made the point repeatedly that domestic violence movement is gravely underfunded and understudied."

Today, the abuse/Super Bowl issue is thoroughly clouded, with the opposing claims often made to support the claimant's agenda for or against the women's movement generally.

Myths like this are one of the biggest problems in a reporter's life. Journalist Edward Jay Epstein calls it news from nowhere. Over the course of my career I have seen one claim after another drive our coverage. Every one of these has turned out to be false:

- Parents are moving their children from public to private schools.

- Social Security is about to go broke.

- Global warming doesn't exist.

- There's a link between breast cancer and abortion.

- School violence is on the rise.

- Crack is instantly addicting.

- Suicide rises during the holidays.

Yet each of them has generated huge amounts of news coverage. Worse, they have driven major, expensive, and unnecessary changes in public policy. For instance, school violence has been declining since the 1960s. But because of news coverage of a claimed increase, think of how much education funding has been diverted to security systems, guards, weaponry, and so on.

Education and crime are the two areas (other than war) in which the taxpayers are gouged the worse.

Reporters generally do not know how to do valid research and don't know how to read research materials when they do. A few days after the end of the 1993 Nevada Legislature, a Las Vegas reporter wrote a story claiming that the lawmakers had accidentally outlawed prostitution in the state. The chair of one of the legislative judiciary committees tried to tell the reporter that her story was flawed and pointed her in the direction of the research she needed to do, but she apparently failed to do it. She didn't' cross reference the statute she thought outlawed prostitution with another statute and ended up starting a firestorm. The story ran in Las Vegas, then statewide, then around the world. Tabloid shows sent crews to Nevada to do stories. Somehow after the whole fuss was over the brothels kept operating.

But usually reporters don't do research at all. That would spoil good stories. "Journalism tends to choose sexy crime anecdotes that perpetuate myths over informative, substantive stories that explain crime," wrote recovering crime reporter David Krajicek. He noted that hysterical crime coverage tends to generate laws that make cause more crime and vacuum up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars -- "and as a result the U.S. has five times the imprisonment rate of any other in the group of seven leading industrialized nations," said Krajicek.

He notes that sometimes journalists benefit from making up a crime wave and then by debunking it -- "having conditioned readers to cower in the corner with the shrill pitch of crime news, they periodically produced stories noting that Americans had a fear of crime that verged upon the irrational."

It's not just that reporters are lazy, though some are. It's also that large media corporations want the same number of reporters to keep producing more and more work. Taking the time to check a story out before publishing or broadcasting it is not high on the list of things reporters are given to do.