There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This classic line from Benjamin Disraeli sums up the complexity that voters face as they try to parse the talking points coming out of the McCain and Obama campaigns. Just what does it mean that the Arizona senator voted with Bush 90 percent of his time in the Senate?
The task of making sense of these facts and figures falls to journalists, and the Chicago Tribune’s Tim Jones makes this important point in a recent piece about the fungibility of numbers.
For example, in the discussion of the 90 percent, Jones crucially points out that “it’s not always obvious, for example, whether a vote was ‘with Bush,’ ‘against Bush’ or neither. Many of those votes were non-controversial.”
These are the distinctions that the press should be making every time they cite a statistic, because numbers without context are easily recruited by campaign spin-meisters. As such, they can be incredibly misleading to the reading, voting public.
The message machine believes that voters subscribe to the “numbers don’t lie” view of the world, which is why they are so commonly invoked in talking points, instead of full explanations. “Nuance is hardly welcome in partisan warfare,” Jones writes. But by going beyond the numbers, reporters should provide depth and analysis that makes sense of the math, and advances the discussion of the issues.
The problem with “numbers” journalism is evident when it comes to financial journalism as well. Last March, the Washington Post pointed out that the barrage of figures coming out of the reporting on housing prices led to confusion about what it all really meant: “How can the government report nearly 6 percent average appreciation of existing homes at the same time that the most comprehensive private-sector study of actual selling prices says they are down by more than 3 percent?”
These holes in understanding are precisely the ones that reporters have to keep plugging. Otherwise this whole enterprise is a sinking ship.
Katia Bachko is on staff at The New Yorker.