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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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24 January 2005 - 11:10 am
Daniel Okrent, the New York Times's Public Editor, wrote a very interesting column paired with a couple entries in his weblog about the use of numbers and statistics in media reporting. (Here is the article while the two weblog posts are here.) Statistics are a very interesting thing. Almost always, without context statistics are meaningless, yet they are seen by the public as the gold standard of truth. That "the numbers don't lie" is so widely accepted is a bit disturbing, especially when the public seems to be so greatly concerned with journalistic bias these days.
If Okrent's argument that reporters don't have the mathematical background to understand the statistics they use in their articles, this is a very disturbing revelation. Webloggers like to pride themselves on being the new journalists, but the truth of the matter is that credentialed reporters often have more access to information than the general information. If they can't intelligent analyze the statistics they use in their articles, it will be difficult for anyone to correct them because we often lack the base data that the statistics are drawn from. As Okrent argues, the best way to address this is to make statistical training for reporters the norm
Posted by on 24 January 2005 at 11:10 AM
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