Journalistic innumeracy

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 February 2006 at 15:34
Tags: Newspapers

American blogger (and journalist) Matthew Yglesias’s repsonse to a William Cohen column about algebra is right — mathematics is difficult:

… there’s simply no way you can write about the budget, or tax policy, or Social Security, or whether or not the health care system suffers from too much “adverse selection” unless you understand some math. You can’t really write about anything sensibly unless you grasp the difference between a one percent change in something and a one percentage point change or whether or not 100 milion dollars is a lot of money relative to the size of the federal budget or the American GDP. Sadly, Cohen is more-or-less correct to say that an inability to grasp these kinds of mathematical concepts does not, in practice, seem to impede one’s career as a political journalist in contemporary America. But that says a lot more about the poor state of journalism than it does about the value of algebra.

Don’t worry, Matt. This is not just an American affliction. British hacks are widely reputed to be innumerate, too.

Tags: Newspapers