Every year, Scott Maier, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, asks his students to raise their hands if they went into journalism because they love writing. Unsurprisingly, most of them put their hands in the air.
“Then I ask how many of them got into journalism because they love math and numbers, and the hands that stay up are pretty few,” he said. “In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.”
Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math. “As mathematicians, journalists make fine geishas,” declared a correction in the West Australian last year. If you look at the sheer volume of numerical errors committed by the press every day, you’d probably be inclined to agree.
Almost every story contains a number, be it a statistic, an address, or someone’s age. Journalists deal with numbers every single day, and yet so many of us willingly profess ignorance or fear when faced with simple arithmetic. This fear combines with a lack of training to rank numerical errors among the most common mistakes made by journalists. I have an ever-expanding archive of these errors.
But it’s time to recognize that handling and interpreting math and numbers are some of the cornerstones of journalism. “As newspapers and news magazines chart a new course for themselves where they have to explain rather than just report, what’s happening is that our reliance on math and numbers becomes even more important, rather than less so,” Maier said.
Numerical errors usually occur for one of these five reasons:
• A journalist mishears a correct number given to them by a source and fails to double-check it.
• A source unwittingly provides a mistaken piece of information and the journalist fails to verify it.
• A source deliberately fudges the numbers and the journalist fails to verify them.
• A journalist or editor miscalculates a figure.
• A journalist re-reports a mistake made by another media outlet.
These are very straightforward scenarios, all of which can be solved with two basic actions. First, journalists need to acquire the basic math skills needed to properly handle numbers and figures. Second, they need to develop the habit of double-checking every number and figure. (I’d call this the mantra of “Math twice, publish once,” but I don’t want to sacrifice language at the altar of arithmetic.)
Things become complicated—not to mention embarrassing and embarrassingly hilarious—after inaccurate numbers make their way out into the world. The more often a statistic is reported and re-reported, the more authority it assumes. At a certain point, an incorrect number gains a wake of supporting citations that can challenge or overcome the actual facts.
Another byproduct of numerical errors is amusing corrections. I hand out the Numerical Error of the Year every December, and am never short on entries. Last year’s winner was from The New York Times:
An article on Wednesday about the delivery of Barry Bonds’s 756th home run ball to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum misstated the number of votes cast in an online contest held by Marc Ecko, the fashion designer who purchased the ball and asked people to vote on what to do with it. About 10 million votes — not “10,000 million” — were recorded.
Zeroes, and specifically how many of them to use, are a persistent problem. The Advertiser of Australia this week ran a very confusing correction in a similar vein:
LAST week’s NIE resource on Science questions answered by CSIRO incorrectly stated that there are 12 zeros in one billion billion. There are 24 zeros if a million times a million is doubled. Many now regard a billion as a thousand times a million. This would be 18 zeros when doubled.
Great piece, Ryan. I've actually gotten a little better at math during 20+ years as a reporter, but that didn't stop me from making a $60 million error last month in a pension story.
The horrible part? Almost no one noticed.
#1 Posted by edward ericson, CJR on Sun 22 Nov 2009 at 09:03 AM
er, make that "Great piece, Craig."
Bad at reading bylines too.
#2 Posted by edward ericson, CJR on Sun 22 Nov 2009 at 09:18 AM
Fairly elementary math skills are especially important in environmental and health care coverage. Global warming projections are usually based on computer models relying on mathematical programming assumptions. Elizabeth Kolbert of the fact-checking-famed New Yorker mangled some math in a 2007 profile of Amory Lovins, as I recall. I'd say it was a sign of the decline of that esteemed publication, but I remember a similar case back in the Shawn era when Richard Barnet showed a similar deficiency in a piece on what is now called globalization. I spotted it, and I was only a student at the time.
One problem is that math is more than just adding, subtracting, etc. A few years ago during the anti-tobacco hysteria, journalists were parroting self-interested lawyers in asserting that smoking costs the public extra in health expenditures. (Similar arguments were made about motorcycle helmet laws and other nanny-state crusades.) The conceptual flaw in these arguments is that everyone eventually dies, and the cost of taking care of an elderly person who has lived a healthy life to 79 can be - usually is - in excess of the cost of attending a lung cancer victim who dies at 59. This is an example of the 'hidden' mathematics of a lot of the current debate.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 23 Nov 2009 at 12:46 PM
The most egregious numbers mistake most all journalist make is to accept without question almost any number handed out by a government entity. This mistake is most commonly seen at the local TV News level. Case in point is the claim that "47 million Americans" are uninsured. Almost as soon as the statistic hit the news, blogs and posts and pundits around the country were refuting , on the internet, the figure successfully. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and others, all fell for the line, which was the major selling point for so-called "reform." They applied no critical thinking to the claim, no questioning of who these uninsured folks are and why they have no insurance. It was as though the media had a stake in "reform" legislation's passage into law. Now, the media are willing to accept the claim that reform will only cover 31 million of the 47 million, leaving 16 million out in the cold. They don't even question the 31 million, and apparently cannot subtract 31 from 47 and ask who and why the 16 million are being left out! They give more coverage to 500 deaths because of swine flu. And, we wonder why the media, national and local, have little credibility with the American news consumer.
#4 Posted by Dougmatt, CJR on Mon 23 Nov 2009 at 06:31 PM
@Dougmatt: Absolutely correct. Even when Obama switched to the 30 million number there wasn't a peep from the MSM.
I guess they were too busy fact-checking Sarah Palin.
#5 Posted by JLD, CJR on Mon 23 Nov 2009 at 09:35 PM
I love the way the media talks about healthcare costs in terms of 10 years (1 trillion dollars) and talks about military budgets in terms of yearly costs (600 billion dollars). You ask a lot of people which will cost more, military or healthcare and they will say "well healthcare costs a trillion."
But it doesn't. It costs 100 billion in the same terms that you'd use to describe military.
You find this kind of funny business on other issues such as social security, which people say is in dire straits because it's out of money in 2039. Action could be taken in those intervening years like what Reagan did (raising payroll taxes) or what should be done (eliminating the payroll tax cap so that upper income earners pay the same rate into the system that they benefited from as everyone else) but what is argued is that David Walker's hyperventilations that "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! FISCAL APOCALYPSE! END TIMES! END TIMES!" Meanwhile, medicare and medicaid are going to be exhausted in 2019.
That's a decade away.
In an industry who's costs are growing at about 2% above inflation.
In a country in which health care coverage is tied to their employment. And during a prolonged recession people lose their employment.
A country in which employers are skimping on their health care obligations because they can't afford to chip in for the rising costs of their employees coverage while competing with countries like Canada and Japan, who've socialized that cost, and Mexico and China, who don't have that cost at all.
You ask people which is in more dire straits and they will likely say social security.
People don't look at the math, they look at the narrative. Reporters who write the narrative without understanding the math end up writing some very strange things.
And this causes the audience to have a funhouse view of the world, in which thin is fat, up is down, and people don't have a clue of how things really are.
And then they are asked on a poll "Is the environment important?" and they answer "Well, maybe. But social security is about to collapse and health care reform is going to cost a trillion dollars and hells bells we're spending too much and death panels and..."
This is why the numbers are so important and one must be sure to get them right, because the numbers, if they are right, don't lie. You can invent a thousand stories to explain a data point or two, but if you have enough numbers, they don't lie.
I just wish I could say the same for people.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 23 Nov 2009 at 11:33 PM
yes, I did turn to jornalism because I sucked at maths but surprisingly since undergrad college, I've become more and more interested and aware of it. Now, as a student at Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, I understand why they have a paper here called 'News and Numbers'.
#7 Posted by vipul viek, CJR on Tue 24 Nov 2009 at 04:58 AM
Re the mythological '47 million Americans' figure repeated mindlessly by so many MSM employees . . . A. J. Liebling once did an amusing piece on the way the numbers jumped around in news stories on how many soldiers could be used in the Korean War if Chiang Kai-shek were 'unleashed'. Liebling's real target was conservative politicians, and he was making light of their overselling of the difference Taiwanese troops could make in that conflict. The lazy use of assorted numbers for those without medical insurance similarly reflects the agenda of those pushing from greater political intervention in health care, and those trying to bring attention to this laziness are playing Liebling's role. Sometimes truth does emerge from partisan conflict, which is why I think the emergence of potent right-wing news sources is a good thing for consumers. In earlier times, the '47 million' figure would have gone completely unchallenged or clarified.
#8 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 24 Nov 2009 at 12:44 PM