Part 4: How Journalists are trained to censor data

This is how journalists are trained to censor hard data from news stories:

# The most effective writing comes from selection, not compression, of facts. It's also true with numbers. Choose only the numbers that have meaning to your readers.

# Consider charting numbers instead of writing them. Removing them from the text not only improves your story; it often makes a bigger impression on readers.

# Pepper your story with just the right number in just the right place rather than cramming them all together. Use an anecdote, quote or observation to separate paragraphs with lots of numbers.

# Recast as many numbers as possible in simple terms that remove their abstraction. Ratios, rates, pictorial images and rounding can help simplify numbers.

Mathematics is detailed oriented; most writing is rarely detailed oriented. In writing, we are taught to simplify our sentences (I've written 7 books and I learned a lot from the editors who effectively simplified my text.) The book The Elements of Style is perhaps the best book ever written on good writing (and its short!)

But there seems to be a problem in the bridging of the world of math and the world of writing.

Unlike text, where less text may make the same point more clearly, in math, you cannot leave out the details.

Math, like text, must also be "read". But most readers have not learned how to read math. Instead, their eyes glaze over and they jump ahead to the text description. When reading math you must slow down, digest and think. Reading math is harder than reading text.

Just because reading math is hard is not an excuse to censor math from the record.

Journalists are applying rules that make sense for text and verbal concepts to all math and data. Removing the details of the math does not always make a better story - it often makes the story incomplete, meaningless or plain wrong. There are many examples (including some I've posted in previous parts of this series) where reducing math content leads to less understanding, not more.

The goal should be accurate understanding - not "easier to read". Journalists have confused the idea that "easier to read" means "less data" leads to better understanding, when it often leads instead to mis-understanding. Worse, reporters who have difficulty doing percentage calculations are selecting which numbers they think are important. This is not a good strategy for accurate reporting.

And let's not get into accurate science concepts where even the correction has an error.

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Journalists also seem trained to write idiotic statements without thinking. Take for example, this item:

"The San Diego region is poised for an economic boost next year as homeowners who lost houses in last week's dramatic wildfires there set about rebuilding, analysts said on Tuesday."

If disasters create economic booms, then why not enable more flooded cities (Katrina) and forest fires, or for that matter, terrorist acts in the U.S.? Perhaps the U.S. military should use our "creaky infrastructure" for target practice? Heck, it would boost the economy!

The problem that the reporter cannot sense is that economic data measure contemporary spending and fail to account for the preceding disaster losses. Incredibly, I have read this same nonsense claim from dim witted journalists after every major disaster in the United States!

For example, suppose you fall into a hole. Climbing out of the hole only gets you to ground level - the trend is positive and looks great, but you are no higher than when you started. A disaster is a fake economic boom because economic statistics fail to account for the destruction of wealth during the disaster.

I am aghast that the reporter was unable to question the "experts" on this - but alas, the young reporter undoubtedly treated the quoted economists and professors with deferential reverence.

Update: "Every day one of our national newspapers publishes a piece reporting on “scientific research” and nearly every day the report is misleading, inaccurate, shows poor understanding of science and scientific research methods, and irritates the hell out of many a hardworking researcher. Often the original research is crap too. Millions of innocent people are misdirected and confused as new and often harmful myths are started. But as you are reading this BMJ blog you know these sad facts only too well." (by Terrence Collis, director fo the Food Standards Agency, in a guest post on the blog of the British Medical Journal)

Update: Here is a contemporary item in 2007 regarding a reporter leaving out the actual numbers in an article about a presidential candidate.

Afterword: The journalist whose article inspired me to write this entire series (the numbers that did not add up) has written an article with tips for reporters to do better on health care reporting - such as, don't start with the anecdote, and "understand the magnitude of impact". The latter would be, I guess, why her advocacy article on putting a defibrillator in each local health club began with an anecdote and never mentioned that such a program might save just 3 lives per century.

This series has been a sad commentary on the state of journalism. As the number of news readers drops each year, the solution is not to put bad reporting on the web faster nor to dumb down the stories even further with more anecdotes and "he said, she said" quotes. Adding multimedia to bad reporting is no improvement either.

The real solution will require hard work - may be developing some genuine math and statistical skills - and writing reports based on where the data leads, not on where the pre-determined "narrative" takes us.

Update: Take a look at how an activist organization planted a story lead in newspapers across the United States in April 2009 - for the purpose of furthering their organization's political agenda. Looking under the covers required doing some minimal math, which reporters are generally incapable of doing.

Update: Professional journalists are fond of telling us that professional journalism does extensive research and fact checking and balanced reporting, unlike bloggers. Unfortunately, put some of these professionals on stage and their utter ineptness becomes the story, rather than the subject. Far more details of this journalistic disaster are here including the journalist's short online follow up. (I suspect this was a case where the audience was smarter than the reporter doing the on stage interview and she served only to embarrass herself with mindless questions and self promotion. That may work on CNN or Fox but not in front of a tech audience.)

Update: In the future - which is now today - written newspaper reports will no longer be written in your town. Instead, they are now being tele-written out of Bangalore, India for pennies. As the local newspaper model collapses nationwide due to their decades late introduction of innovation, inefficiency (monopolies breed inefficiency) and bad reporting, the new model to emerge appears likely to be web-based, with much of the work outsourced overseas where "reporters" can use the telephone to interview subjects, write their reports, and email them back to the local editor in the U.S. Another model is to just become a news blog with unpaid reader contributions.