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PunditFact: Frankly, Matt Lauer, your Golden Globe facts are off

 
Kevin Spacey won a Golden Globe Sunday for his role in House of Cards as Frank Underwood, but contrary to Today host Matt Lauer’s claims, the name probably hasn’t leaped in popularity.
Kevin Spacey won a Golden Globe Sunday for his role in House of Cards as Frank Underwood, but contrary to Today host Matt Lauer’s claims, the name probably hasn’t leaped in popularity.
Published Jan. 13, 2015

Red carpet interviews are substance-free safe zones for fact-checkers, a rare chance to turn on the TV and turn off our ears for misleading claims.

That's what we thought, anyway, going into the Golden Globes. We tuned in Sunday for the pre-show with a beverage in one hand and our phone in the other for snarky tweeting.

Then Today host Matt Lauer had to go and kill our vibe with an apparently researched question for Kevin Spacey, who stars as the conniving Frank Underwood on Netflix's House of Cards.

"You know, we were sitting together at breakfast, and we saw a fact," Lauer said, daring us to give him our full attention. "Do you know that the name Frank has risen in popularity by 20 percent since this show debuted? What does that say about parents across America?"

"Well," Spacey said, "if the parents also have last names that start with a U, then F. U. as initials has risen dramatically as well."

The actor-jokester went on to have a great night, winning his first Globe for Best Actor in a TV series (drama) for his role as Underwood.

But we had work to do. Was Lauer for real about Frank taking a leap in popularity since the debut of House of Cards in February 2013?

We turned to a super glamorous source: the Social Security Administration, which tracks baby names going back to 1880 based on applications for a child's Social Security number.

Frank, a form of Francis (the given name of Spacey's character), was really big near the turn of the 20th century. From 1880 to 1892, it was the sixth-most popular name of U.S. males. It remained in the top 10 of baby names for boys until 1923, the year it started its long, slow slide to its most unpopular point in 2013, when it hit the 327th spot.

This is where we have to introduce a major plot twist: The Social Security Administration has not yet released its 2014 data. The agency releases this annually before Mother's Day weekend.

Without it, we can't discern a reliable change in popularity of the name since the show's debut.

Lauer, though, seems to be recalling a news release from BabyCenter.com, a pregnancy and parenting website of Johnson & Johnson that releases an annual Baby Names Survey and Top 100 Names list based on 406,000 babies born in 2014 to registered BabyCenter users.

BabyCenter global editor in chief Linda Murray hailed 2014 as the "year of the binge-watching baby name" due to 20 percent of moms saying TV shows influenced their baby's name.

Frank saw a 19 percent increase from the 352nd ranking to No. 297 among BabyCenter users. Other names from House of Cards also got smaller bumps, such as Frank's wife, Claire; journalist Zoe; and lobbyist Remy.

Netflix's Orange is the New Black also inspired a rash of baby-naming, BabyCenter says, most strikingly with Galina (up 67 percent) but also with Nicky, Piper and Dayanara.

That doesn't mean we should take BabyCenter's word as gold. These increases are just the percentage that the names moved up the list from the year before.

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A potential uptick of Franks may relate to House of Cards, but it may also have to do with parents who want to honor Pope Francis but don't want to call their children Francis.

"Frank has been so unpopular for so long that you could get what looks like a really big jump just from a couple dozen names," said Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard.

So to recap, Lauer's claim about a 20 percent increase in Franks seems traceable to BabyCenter, the goal of which is to generate publicity and not sound scientific methods; the Social Security Administration has not released the data we need; and the name Frank never had a lower ranking than in 2013.

We rate this claim Mostly False.