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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged numeracy

1. February 24, 2011 09:45 PM

   WSJ Slips Up on a Union Story

   And its misses tilt toward the anti-labor side

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's page-one story yesteday on the union battle in Wisconsin erred on a few points, all of which skew coverage against the union side. First the paper misleads readers by implying that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker campaigned on taking away collective bargaining rights from government workers: Several of the new governors ran campaigns promising to go after...

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2. March 11, 2011 12:21 PM

   A Zombie Lie Is Born

   CNBC's false welfare-state story spreads far and wide

   By Ryan Chittum

   Two days ago I fisked a false report from CNBC that said more than a third of all wages and salaries are now government handouts. That kind of a report, based on a study by an outfit called TrimTabs Investment Research, is genetically engineered to go viral. I closed my post with this pessimistic note: This one will presumably be...

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3. March 31, 2011 03:05 PM

   An Atlantic Ghost Story

   Housing crash porn with no "there" there

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Atlantic runs a slideshow post by 24/7 Wall St.'s Douglas A. McIntyre with the click-me headline "The New American Ghost Towns"—a red flag that this piece may be oversold. Here's the lede: There are several counties in America, each with more than 10,000 homes, which have vacancy rates above 55%. The rate is above 60% in several. Hmmm. Sixty...

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4. September 5, 2012 11:00 AM

   Audit Notes: blame the borrowers, Walmart cashiers, newspaper prices

   The Democratic Party platform on mortgage issues

   By Ryan Chittum

   Henry Blodget somehow thinks that "everyone has spent the last five years trying to blame the housing crash on every conceivable housing-market participant (except the buyers who voluntarily paid and borrowed too much--they're apparently blameless)." He must have missed that whole Rick Santelli/Tea Party thing, the most prominent of innumerable examples in the blame-the-borrowers genre. Also, Blodget apparently hasn't read...

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5. November 6, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: digital ads, margins of error, freehadists

   French publishing's online revenues make the Americans look good

   By Ryan Chittum

   This New York Times story is nice on the coming attempt in Europe to get Google to pay content providers for selling ads against their headlines. But this stat from the head of France's newspaper and magazine association caught my eye (emphasis mine) : In countries like Germany, France and Italy, where news sites’ online audiences are more limited by...

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6. March 9, 2011 10:20 AM

   CNBC Misleads on “Welfare State” Dominance

   Bad math overstates government payouts

   By Ryan Chittum

   (UPDATE: See my follow-up post here: A Zombie Lie Is Born: CNBC’s false welfare-state story spreads far and wide.) There are so many things wrong with this CNBC "Fast Money" story it's hard to know where to begin.

 But let’s start with the headline:

 Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages 

I guess the first thing to point...

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7. December 6, 2010 11:29 AM

   Journalists Need to Do the Math

   Numbers still make many watchdogs whimper

   By Justin D. Martin

   CAIRO—I tell my students that in addition to English they should learn two more languages: an in-demand foreign tongue, and statistics. Studying Chinese or Hindi is a great move for an aspiring reporter, but numbers are the true global language. Journalists who can amass and interpret data can cover more of the world in a short time than reporters who...

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8. December 6, 2010 04:42 PM

   Michael Kinsley Takes Issue with an Audit Criticism

   By Ryan Chittum

   Michael Kinsley writes to say I missed the point of his column asking "Are we poorer than we used to be?" Kinsley left a comment on my post, but I want to make sure it doesn't slip through the cracks. Here's his response in full: Ryan [Chittum] [correcting a misspelling of my name] writes that I "flub the numbers and...

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9. August 20, 2012 02:06 PM

   Misleading and incomplete coverage of Apple’s ‘record’ value (CORRECTED)

   Microsoft's 1999 market cap still, by far, bigger

   By Ryan Chittum

   The big market news today is about Apple's gargantuan market capitalization reaching a new, stunning high: Bloomberg News: Apple Becomes Biggest Company in History, Passing Microsoft in 1999 CNNMoney: Apple is now the most valuable company of all time The Wall Street Journal's lede: Apple is now the most valuable company of all time. USA Today: Apple sets record for...

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10. August 17, 2012 06:50 AM

    SmartMoney is confused on wages, inflation

    When prices matter and when they don't

    By Ryan Chittum

    This SmartMoney post on "Why You're Not Getting a Raise" doesn't make sense. The lede: Didn’t get a raise this year? Blame inflation. Hmm, I'd blame the weak economy and excess supply of labor before inflation, which seems more correlation than causation. Corporate profits are, after all, at a record high, so the raise money is there: With unemployment at...

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11. March 15, 2012 01:45 AM

    The Worst Personal-Finance Video Ever

    By Felix Salmon

    Like many people, I’m fascinated by lottery tickets. In many ways they’re the purest speculative investment in the world: a piece of paper which is all but worthless today might be worth $200 million tomorrow. Literally. Lottery tickets are a bit like SWAG assets (silver, wine, art gold) in that you can only make money on them by giving them...

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12. August 16, 2012 11:06 AM

    The WSJ editorial page and Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan

    Bogus numbers and rewritten history

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board's Joseph Rago makes a whopper of an error in a column Tuesday extolling Paul Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program that probably wouldn't cover the cost of old folks' health care. Under the 2008 roadmap, seniors would get a straight cash voucher for $9,500 a year (the amount Medicare then spent...

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13. May 9, 2011 12:40 PM

    U.S. Oil Is Limited and Fungible, the HuffPost Reports

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Huffington Post's Michael McAuliff has a good piece of reporting on the potential impact of a bill the House passed last week that would make it easier to drill for oil. The HuffPost pulls a couple of quotes from Republican House members to show the flawed thinking behind the bill: "I think high gas prices and high energy costs...

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14. August 24, 2012 06:50 AM

    WaPo dings the ‘give-it-away-free approach’

    A mess of a story on Facebook

    By Ryan Chittum

    There's all kinds of irony about the Washington Post slapping a company for a "give-it-away-free approach" that has hurt share prices. There's the fact that the WaPo once had an option to buy 10 percent of this extremely valuable firm—a stake that would have had a return of 160,000 percent in seven years—but it gave it away free. There's the...

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15. November 5, 2012 01:00 PM

    What are the odds?

    Dealing with percentages

    By Merrill Perlman

    Take this quiz: If one candidate has 46 percent of the likely voters, and the other has 48 percent, what’s the gap between them? If you said 2 percent, go to the back of the line. The gap between them is 2 percentage points. It’s a4 percent difference. (Either way, it probably falls in the margin of error, so don’t...

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