Part 1: The Math-Free Zone of Journalism

I am late to noticing the lack of quantitative analysis and simple math skills amongst those in the journalism business.

Since I lack a Ph.D. in the subject matter (or any Ph.D. as I only have a Masters), I am automatically not an expert and no one will care much for what I think. So instead I quote from the experts - who work in the journalism field - and who have been documenting a lack of basic math skills in the math-free-zone of journalism for years and consider the problem to be a crisis (about which nothing is being done).

Source: American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Columnist James Kilpatrick has collected such a thick file of mathematical errors in newspapers that he’s convinced many journalists cannot handle even grade-school math. He declares: "People who write for a living should never be left alone with mathematics. They are almost bound to mess up."

The article says the average score among a group of journalists taking a test of simple middle school math questions like those on this Math Test for Journalists was just 68% - essentially a failing score. This may be the actual test on which they earned an average score of 68% - this is 6th grade math skills. Appalling.

Source: Dr. Kathleen Woodruff Wickham, author of Math Tools for Journalists:

Journalists are notoriously bad with numbers. Either from lack of training or an innate phobia of figures, journalists routinely avoid tackling math problems and often make mistakes when they do delve into numbers.

Notes from a conference held in June of 2005 says that journalists only need "6th grade math" but apparently cannot even do that (quoting conference speaker Steve Doig, Chair, Kronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University).

Comments from journalists themselves:

According to the ACEJMC, to be accredited, a journalism program's curriculum "...should provide up-to-date instruction in the skills and in the theories, history, functions, procedures, law, ethics and effects of journalism and mass communications...." AND "Competence in language use and visual literacy should be stressed throughout the curriculum...."

And that's as specific as it gets in terms of curriculum standards or expectations. There is not one word anywhere in the ACEJMC document that would suggest journalists need any quantitative skills. Not surprising that, and I only know of two programs -- Arizona State and Hawaii -- that require their graduates to have a course in statistics, for example. It seems to me that if a GA reporter can't compute percent of change or percent of proportion, for example, he/she literally cannot competently cover ANY aspect of government.

As of the 2005-2006 academic year, the Accrediting Council for journalism and mass communications schools adopted its first ever math recommendation that "graduates should ... be able to" "apply basic numerical and statistical concepts". This means basic arithmetic, percentages, averages and that is about it.

My previous observation that journalists live in a math-free-zone was dead on. Most journalism programs do not have requirements for math beyond the minimal high school math classes required for college admission, as noted by the just updated accrediting standards. I checked a few university journalism programs and several had no math requirements even in the "general education" or "core requirements" category. Based on the sample tests linked above, journalists need only master middle school grade level skills - we are not discussing algebra yet. This is just arithmetic, not even math. Many journalists lack sufficient numeracy skill to even understand why this is a problem.

And some journalists are simply math morons: "Seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, and the 10 warmest have all occurred since 1997." Wow. 7 of the 8 warmest years in record occurred during the past SIX YEARS. (This was written in 2007 and presumably accounted for the years 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 - which is just 5 years, or 6 years if you include the not yet completed 2007. Either way, even the simplest of math is wrong.)

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Ran across another item that explains why reporters poorly or rarely question experts, a problem noted by Professor Edward Wasserman at Washington and Lee University. They are taught that if the source has been peer reviewed, then it is probably correct, which means reporters do not understand what peer review is about nor understand its problems (see chapter 2 of Dr. Bill Hersh's textbook, Information Retrieval or this mea culpa from Dr. Lawrence Altman in the NY Times). Read this column from Nature to learn about some of the problems or issues raised by this item from the University of Michigan Press.

Journalism students are apparently incorrectly taught that peer reviewers check and validate the underlying claims, assumptions, data and conclusions which is typically not true of peer review (and in some science fields the data has been kept secret.) The assumption that peer-reviewed means verified and tested is likely a common misconception held by the general public too. Most article submissions that do not pass peer review end up published in a different journal anyway. (There is peer reviewed research that suggest most published studies are subsequently shown to be wrong - on the order of 98% of them are wrong. A study published in Science long ago found that only 1% of studies are cited by other studies six or more times. Nearly half are never cited and most of the remainder are cited only once which means the studies were likely wrong, incomplete, or worthless.)

Peer review does not mean the work has been audited, verified and tested and is therefore accurate or reliable. A professor at Drexel University explains this better than I.

Junkfood Science has added a column on "math phobia" and how the public and the media are misled by science research (and mostly misled by media morons).

I am slowly working on adding a lot more to this topic, which will appear as a Part 2 and a Part 3. I will address why journalists avoid math, why they are taught to avoid using math in stories (even if it leads to "fake but accurate" news, as I will demonstrate) and more. Sadly, a good rule of thumb is that if the news report involves science, health care, the environment, or topics where numbers and statistics - including accounting and finance - are extremely important to understanding the story, then the news report is often wrong. (One exception is that some business reporters do have training in business, economics or finance ... although I can think of examples were those who obviously had no such training got things rather confused.)

Almost comically, this is well known in the media but they will never report on this issue in their own publications.