Mashable's Misleading Headline

Sometimes scientific research makes me shake my head derisively, not understanding what the point was of the entire ordeal.  More often times the headlines associated with these studies make me laugh.  Mashable posted a summary of a study trying to tie together the regularity of binge drinking based on whether the survey took place over a landline telephone or a cell phone.  Having not read the entire study, I can't determine if the endeavor is as ridiculous as it sounds in Mashable's article, but I can say that Mashable's headline - Cellphone Users Like to Be Drunk - and their summary statement ("A study released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control shows that cellphone users are more likely to binge drink than other groups surveyed.") made me laugh.

They might as well have said "Human Beings Who Breathe Appreciate Oxygen".  Narrowing the study down to such a simplistic phrase depreciates whatever value the actual study had in the first place.  Considering the wide range of people who own and use cell phones, of course a portion of those people would be more likely to binge drink than other groups.  People who do not use cell phones tend to be of an older generation or very young.  What the study then goes on to show is that people who only use cell phones - meaning they have no landlines at their homes, I'm assuming - are more inclined to be binge drinkers. 

Considering that in 2010, nearly a quarter of all householdshad no landline (Reuters 5/12/10) and nearly half of people ages 25-29 lived in cell phone-only homes, it makes sense that the "cell phone only" demographic tends to have a higher rate of binge drinking.  The CDC just recently released a study  (LA Times 1/10/12) that concluded most binge drinkers fall into the age range of 18-34, so the results of the cell phone study seem to be even more like proving the obvious than on first glance.

So what is the point of all of this?  Why must bloggers attempt to sensationalize even the most non-sensational of news items?  The title of the Mashable post doesn't seem very SEO friendly nor does it state the actual conclusions to which the study came.  Instead it substitutes accurate reporting for a really obvious yet totally misleading account of a study that seems to have very little use in the first place.