In a recent Associated Press story, David Crary wrote:

The percentage of Americans who consider children "very important" to a successful marriage has dropped sharply since 1990, and more now cite the sharing of household chores as pivotal, according to a sweeping new survey.

The reader would undoubtedly think that the report was about what makes for a successful marriage. Unfortunately, as Wilfred McClay notes over at First Things, that’s not really what the report is about.

Skeptical as I am of all polling data, I found it hard to believe that Pew would have constructed a survey designed to show such a thing. I looked at Pew’s website and found that the study itself bears a radically different headline: “As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned about Social Impact.” Quite different. At first I thought I must be looking at an entirely separate study. But I wasn’t. Astonishingly, I found only a mention, and no discussion, of “household chores” in the Pew Executive Summary. Instead, I found bullet points such as these:

• Public Concern over the Delinking of Marriage and Parenthood.
• Marriage Remains an Ideal, Albeit a More Elusive One.
• Children Still Vital to Adult Happiness.

In other words, the AP writer, and the headline writers (who were presumably following the writer’s or AP’s lead), seriously distorted the meaning of the report. And the distortion was intentional. Why else would so much attention be given to the matter of “household chores,” which are mentioned only in passing in the full report, and never discussed or analyzed? Why would there be so little indication of what Pew’s own headline fairly shouts: that the general public itself is uneasy about many of the phenomena here being described? Why no attention to Pew’s larger concern, that what we are seeing (particularly when one connects it with high rates of out-of-wedlock births) is a potentially momentous (and historically unprecedented) separation of marriage and parenthood? Why the need to reduce this fascinating, complex, and troubling trend to a “hook” built around the tiredest of 1970s feminist mantras—sharing the chores?

Why, indeed?