The Times’ John “Hob” Koblin describes how, in its risible house style, “L.G.B.T. [sic] Households are Now Nielsen Families, and Advertisers and Producers Get a Valuable Tool.”
-
Same-sex couples earn significantly more money than their straight counterparts
No, they do not.
To keep lazy-bordering-on-dishonest hacks like Koblin from being lazy or dishonest, nearly ten years ago I read all the research on lesbian and gay earnings and incomes and put everything together in a readily-Googlable place. No journalist has any excuse whatsoever for failing to locate that page.
-
Koblin cites the Treasury paper that details how rich married same-sex couples are. The Treasury paper controls for fewer variables and is concerned with married couples and is but a single data point.
Koblin didn’t bother to respond when I laid out the facts and called him a liar. Remember, this is the newspaper that could not bring itself to admit that Annie Leibovitz was Susan Sontag’s lover, let alone that Ed Koch was gay.
-
“Our brands will be interested in this not just in terms of being more inclusive, but also to reach a more affluent audience,” said [Rachel] Lowenstein, who works at [a] media agency. “This is something that’ll be extremely valuable once it’s tradable in the marketplace.”
Another reason I went to the trouble of reading nearly 80 research papers in full (which I expect is 79 more than Koblin has ever read over a lifetime) is to counter marketers’ habit of endlessly lying about the “gay market,” which always just meant the gay-male market and positively does not mean, in the Times’ perverse rendering, the EldotGeedotBeedotTee market.
I expect a marketer like Lowenstein to lie to herself about how rich gay men and lesbians are, on average. I don’t exactly expect her not to lie to the public, her clients, or the New York Times, but I’m not surprised she did. (She wouldn’t even confirm her identity for me.)
-
Brian Fuhrer of Nielsen can be expected to report accurate findings about gay men’s and lesbians’ earnings and incomes (he sure knows where to locate them now), and to accurately report the incomes of participants in Nielsen’s survey cohorts. (He too wouldn’t even confirm his identity for me.) I expect people like Koblin and Lowenstein to keep on lying.