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Whopper of the Week: Billy GrahamThe reverend elaborates on his admiration of the Jewish people.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 5:41 PM ET

"I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms."

—Rev. Billy Graham, in a May 1994 statement denying H.R. Haldeman's claim in his published diaries that Graham carried on about "satanic Jews" in Nixon's presence. Quoted by David Firestone in the March 17 New York Times.

"I go and I keep friends with [Abe] Rosenthal at the New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all—I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."

—Rev. Billy Graham, in a transcript of an Oval Office conversation with Richard Nixon from 1972 recently made public by the National Archives. Quoted in Firestone's March 17 story and elsewhere. (Click here to read Graham's apology, and here to read Slate's David Greenberg on Graham's remarks.)

Special Bonus Mangled Statistic of the Week:

"Men's Share of Housework Remains Same Since 1985"

—headline for the National Organization for Women's "outrage of the week" for March 18. NOW picked it up from Women's ENews.

"U.S. husbands are doing more housework while wives are doing less"

—headline on the press release for the University of Michigan study on which the Women's ENews story was based. Men do the same amount of housework (16 hours a week) as they did in 1985, while women do four hours less housework (27 hours a week) than they did in 1985. Proportionally, that's an increase for men from 34 percent of the housework to 37 percent of the housework, and a decrease for women from 66 percent to 62 percent. The division of housework remains substantially unequal in favor of men, and NOW is right to complain about that. But in no way can it be said that men's "share" of housework is unchanged since 1985. Rather, men's share of housework has increased, slightly.

Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
Mar. 14, 2002: INS commissioner James W. Ziglar
Mar. 8, 2002: Robert Zoellick and the U.S. steel industry
Feb. 28, 2002: Al Sharpton
Feb. 22, 2002: Olympic skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne
Feb. 14, 2002: Kenneth Lay
Feb 8, 2002: Enron spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney
Jan. 31, 2002: Monsanto
Jan. 24, 2002: Linda Chavez
Jan. 17, 2002: George W. Bush
Jan. 10, 2002: Simon & Schuster
Jan. 4, 2002: The Associated Press

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

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Reader Comment From The Fray:


While Timothy Noah correctly stated that NOW misinterpreted the statistics reported by the Univ. of Mich. on men's share of the housework: "Men's Share of Housework Remains Same Since 1985," the amount of time men spend on housework has indeed remained unchanged since 1985 (according to the press release).

The statement that men's share has increased is statistically correct, but the implications could be somewhat misleading. The statement could be read to mean that men have taken on a greater proportion of the housework when their behavior (on average, as a group) has not changed.

What I find inappropriate is that Mr. Noah happily criticized NOW, but not the Univ. of Mich. press release headline, which is also misleading: "U.S. husbands are doing more housework while wives are doing less." The statement, "U.S. husbands are doing more housework" directly contradicts the study's findings as described by Mr. Noah and the findings for 1989-99 described in the press release. Even if the 1989 to 1999 data are ignored, men (on average, as a group) increased their time spent per week on housework a whopping 4 hours per week over the course of 20 years.

The press release, itself, does not even report time diary data that is less than 17 years old. The estimates for 1989 to 1999 come from a different source, a questionnaire, which is likely to produce less accurate results. The absence of participant profiles and descriptions of the methodology render the press release nearly uninterpretable. A rather poor showing for a major university.

--Sherry Mead

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(3/22)

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