Good and Bad use of statistics in the news
As I was looking through many stories involving statistics on the major news outlets, I found two the stuck out to me as a definite good and bad use of numbers.
The good use of statistics is a story entitled “Cabinet officials, Chicagoans discuss ways to end teen violence” and was published by CNN. This story is about the alarming high numbers of teens exposed to violence. This story uses numbers in a good way because it states what survey they are getting their statistics from and discussing the numbers in a simple and easy way, that is easy to understand.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/07/chicago.violence/index.html
The other use of statistics in news reporting comes from the New-Leader in the article entitled “C-Street crime tough to gauge.” The use of numbers comes in when it shows the statistics of 911 calls in that area for a period of three months compared to that same time last year. I think this isn’t good because of the fact that the News-Leader didn’t take into consideration of population change from one period to another. The population of an area seems to go hand and hand with crime rates. If there was no population change, I think that should have been stated in the article.
http://www.news-leader.com/article/20090918/NEWS01/909180343/C-Street+crime+tough+to+gauge
