PressEthic

Trend pieces are notorious for running on the power of a few amazing quotes, exclusive scenes, and the appeal of the story to excite readers.

Throwing sex and teenagers into the mix makes the story even juicier– even if the facts are, at best, shaky. And that, of course, is the problem with trend pieces as city of Baltimore is slowly realizing about a batch of stories that reported the supposed popularity of so-called “sex parties.”

Chris Landers of the Baltimore City Paper reported today:

“The Examiner, for one, which spent the better part of a week cherry-picking statistics and engaging in a game of telephone that resulted in a few days' worth of teen sex party headlines in the paper. After The Examiner broke the story, the local television news outlets picked it up and ran with it as well. It was a good time, and, hey, nobody got hurt.

Except maybe for the teens, who have become the rutting, clap-ridden poster children for wayward youth, and the concerned parents of Carroll County, who were probably preparing to hold shotgun vigils outside their daughters' bedrooms at night.”

Apparently the confusion began when a county drug counselor named Mark Yount told what now looks like to be an exaggerated story about local teenagers attending sex-fueled parties to two different news outlets.

Landers continued:

“Yount is the only named source in any of the media reports, as of this writing, who had heard of the teen sex parties from a source other than The Examiner or Yount himself. How many teens told him the story? None of the accounts give a number, and Yount isn't talking. The only clue came in the first-day story by Volkmann: The teens were ‘both from northern Carroll County.’”

Yount’s comments, coupled with a reportedly misquoted manager at women's county health program, lead to what could be described in a complete snowball of a hot story, spreading like the cliché wild fire.

Lander's article continued:

“The Carroll County Times ran its own editorial, a few days after [Examiner editor Frank] Keegan's appeared, calling the reports of teen-sex parties in the media ‘dramatically overblown.’

"’Unsubstantiated reports of mass orgies involving teenagers and vague references to sex games may make for good headlines or teasers on the television news,’ the paper noted, ‘but the fact is that teen sex is no greater--and no less--of a problem in Carroll than it is in just about any other community in Maryland or across the nation.’”

Since the unraveling of this story is just beginning, I’m sure that we’ll see some retractions and apologies, or at the very least, a follow up to the debunking of the myth of out of control teenage sex parties.

It seems like urban myths like this pop up every few years or so, and I’m sure they are kind of interesting to report, but you’d think that any responsible journalist would know better than to run a story based on vague hearsay from some camera shy high school kids.