GLENDALE, Ariz. – With the NFL’s annual Big Game right around the corner, it’s time yet again for uninformed pundits to pop up on your television asserting a familiar line: Domestic violence incidents spike on Super Bowl Sunday.

This particular factoid has been repeated, ad nauseum, for years, despite the fact there’s no evidence whatsoever to support the claim. The data simply is not there.

Evidently it’s an easy claim to get people to believe, though, perhaps in part because football is undeniably a violent game, one that raises great passion in its fans. Accordingly, it’s probably not hard for a lot of people to imagine an outraged couch potato taking out his favorite team’s Big Game misfortunes on his wife and/or kids.

Nevertheless, the data just doesn’t bear out the claim. If you drill into incident statistics kept by law enforcement, Super Bowl™ Sunday is like any other Sunday with respect to domestic violence – meaning there’s a lot of it, but not because there happens to be a championship football game taking place at the time.

The football-domestic violence connection is just one of many false claims constantly repeated as fact by the national media, of course. I could probably quickly assemble a book twice as thick as Moby Dick just by collecting URLs of nonsense “news” articles, even if I single-spaced the entire list.

It appears the more emotive the sensationalist claim, the easier it is to get people to accept it, regardless how little data exists to support it.

These days, it is commonplace for the media to repeat alarming statistics regarding incidents of human trafficking. Often, you’ll see along with the reported numbers the assertion human trafficking is joined at the hip with the porn industry.

Of course, when it comes to actually substantiating the claim porn is rife with victims of human trafficking, those who assert the connection have little, if anything, to offer as proof.

“You support trafficking when you watch porn,” Eleanor Goldberg flatly states in a recent Huffington Post Top Ten list.

After leading with this bold assertion, however, Goldberg’s support for the claim quickly disintegrates into a series of caveats and qualifiers. I’ve added emphasis to the wiggle words below, just to highlight how little substance the support for the claim actually enjoys.

“Yes, while some experts say watching porn with your partner could improve your relationship, it could also enable traffickers to exploit their victims,” Goldberg wrote. “Even if a porn explicitly states that all actors are over 18 and have consented to being filmed, that just may not be true, Yahoo News reported. The trafficked actresses may simply be trained to look and act older.”

Underlining the quality of Goldberg’s source, the article cited and linked to from her post appears to have been removed by Yahoo News in the interim.

The support for Goldberg’s claim, then, boils down to this: She read something on Yahoo News, which is no longer on the site, but sounded about right to her.

Of course, it’s not just the media saying there’s a frightening amount of human trafficking going on out there. The U.S. government says the same: between 600,000 and 800,000 people trafficked per year, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in 2006.

Something else you’ll notice about the GAO report if you actually read it (which many journalists who cite it evidently have not): The very agency that released the report doesn’t trust its own reported numbers.

“The U.S. government estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 persons are trafficked across international borders annually,” the report states right up front in the summary. “However, such estimates of global human trafficking are questionable. The accuracy of the estimates is in doubt because of methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and numerical discrepancies…. There is also a considerable discrepancy between the numbers of observed and estimated victims of human trafficking.”

You know what you won’t find in the GAO report? The words porn, pornography, adult entertainment or any other term associated with our industry and its products.

When the GAO report references “sex work,” it is explicitly referring to prostitution (a point clarified in an early footnote). The closest the report comes to mentioning anything that could be construed as pornography-related is the phrase “commercial sex act,” but in context, it is clear this is referring to prostitution, as well.

The report identifies eight nations as “priority countries” with respect to the need to crack down on human trafficking in connection with the sex trade: Brazil, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Moldova, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

Granted, there’s a fair amount of porn produced in Brazil, but when people like Eleanor Goldberg assert porn is rife with victims of human trafficking, they’re clearly talking about the American porn industry, an entity that makes precisely zero appearances in the GAO report.

There’s little doubt in my mind some victims of human trafficking, somewhere, have indeed wound up being forced, coerced, or otherwise pressured into making porn. I’m equally certain the likes of Larry Flynt and Steve Hirsch are not among the perpetrators of such inhumane offenses. (I may find Hirsch to be a tasteless, publicity-hungry buffoon, but I’d still confidently wager he’s no sex slave trader.)

The bottom line, and the thing those who believe the porn industry complicit in human trafficking clearly don’t accept or understand, is there’s no shortage of men and women who are more than willing to appear in porn of their own volition.

Even if the head of one Porn Valley production studio or another were big enough an asshole not to care whether he employs victims of human trafficking, why would he (or she) take the legal risk of doing so?

With attractive college girls, Wall Street interns and various living publicity magnets willingly – even eagerly – coming to work in porn of their own accord, studio heads are going to risk going to prison in order to capture a smuggled Moldovan on video? Not bloody likely, folks.

The human trafficking-porn connection assertion isn’t going to go away, probably ever, because it is simply too good a talking point, too good a boogeyman and too good a headline. The only thing it lacks is any sort of basis in fact.

You know what they say, though: Never let facts get in the way of a good story.