One of the major themes of 2010 in the social media sphere was the failings of the Australian political media – most particularly, their inability to deal with serious policy issues rather than trivia. Grog’s election campaign post got a lot of attention, but there were other occasions. The coverage of the insulation fires was woeful, as was the reporting of the alleged BER rorts. There is comparatively little that can be done about the awful state of the commercial media industry except to illustrate it. However, the ABC is a public institution; as such, it’s worth considering more concrete ways in which it could do its job better.
The inability to scrutinize policy has a multitude of potential causes – too-tight deadlines generating “content” for ever-more “platforms”, the “he-said, she-said” approach to balance, and the desire for colour and movement over dry analysis. But I reckon that a major contributing factor has to be that disturbingly few journalists actually know how to analyze policy material presented to them. A number of people have pointed out that much of the Canberra press gallery appears to be economically illiterate. I think it’s worse than that – I suspect that the majority of journalists just aren’t particularly numerate, having not studied mathematics since year 10. Journalists don’t need to be able to tackle Millennium Prize problems in their spare time, but many contemporary public policy debates require the ability to analyze numerical data – including critiquing the numerical data presented by others.
As such, I was interested to come across morenumerate.org, the website of several academics at UC Berkeley about numeracy for journalists, and, specifically, this paper describing and evaluating a short training program for journalism students in what I’d call remedial numeracy – things like basic estimation skills (“back of the envelope”” calculations). Despite the brevity of the training, the authors claim that it achieved quite a bit:
Relative to control data, the experimental group improved on the main numeracy measures: 1) estimation accuracy and 2) math competence involving simple problem solving, data analyses, and exponential growth. Students and faculty both concluded that future students should also receive numeracy modules. The module apparently influenced students’ attitudes about numerical information, too. The collective results may benefit journalists, their instructors, and media consumers.
My guess is that if this can help journalism graduate students in the USA, it could probably help working journalists at the ABC, too, and at fairly modest cost. I wouldn’t consider it adequate – frankly, I think all journalism training should include at least a semester of statistics – but it’s a useful start.
Indeed, does the ABC have an internal ongoing training program for its journalists?
Journalists typically were the kids who excelled at English at school and were booted out of maths classes. As such, they are notoriously innumerate and impatient with numbers when they get in the way of a story they are eager to write.
While numeracy classes certainly wouldn’t hurt, I fear this really would be like trying to teach creative writing to actuaries. For journalists, the imperative is always the story, while science introduces shades of grey.
I wrote about this on The Failed Estate a couple of months ago in reporting a forum on the media’s reporting of climate change. During the forum, SMH environmental reporter Ben Cubby said:
“One thing about journalism that is different from say a scientific journal is that it is also about story telling and it is to some extent about entertainment, as well as informing people,” Cubby said. “You’ve got to sell newspapers, you’ve got to make people watch your TV show. Now that can lead to an unacceptable level of distortion. But the opposite is that every story in the paper could be dull, but worthy.”
It’s interesting that the more complex public issues become – the RSPT and climate change and the GFC being prime examples – the more simplistic the reporting, which in turn seems to reflect the lazy polarity of the public debate and the paucity of attention that most people pay to news.
I believe the answer to all this is not to try and retrain existing journalists, but to breed a new type of media professional – the data journalist. These are people who work alongside the wordsmiths, running spreadsheets and suggesting leads based on what the data is telling us. Possum is a prime example of someone who works this way, although he doesn’t need a wordsmith to help him.
Estimation and statistics are the two glaring omissions from high school maths. Less calculus and pre-calculus, more stuff that is really and truly useful in day-to-day life.
d
I have to agree with Mr. Denmore, above. I did a BA in Media Studies years ago and for some unfathomable reason, we had to do a semester of Statistics. We all struggled through it doing the minimum needed to scrape a pass and bored out of our brains every moment of the class. At then end, I still had no idea how statistics could tell me anything meaningful. Neither did I have any capability to use statistics to analyse data.
I work in television/theatrical documentary production now, which is different, although shares some characteristics as journalism. As Mr. Denmore says, it’s all about the story you can tell. I’m certainly not innumerate and feel comfortable handling seven figure budgets, with the assistance of the accountant for the more technical bits. But I continue to be shocked by the fact that my film producing students find basic arithmetic entirely baffling, which is something they need for budgets.
The first solution that occurred to me to the problem you put forward, is that every media organisation needs a stats expert that can analyse that data set for the journalists.
We’re not totally immune, Robert
I also recall worrying that calculators had been pinched from news rooms plus the fondness for too-good-to-check stories.
Mr. Denmore, possibly ‘typically’, but not all. I studied statistics as part of a science degree, and am now a working journalist (albeit for an obscure industry publication). I know a Fairfax journo who used to be an accountant, as well.
I do agree that media companies would do well to hire someone with statistics/computer science knowledge, and indeed recently smh.com.au posted an ad for a “Database Journalism Editor”, though a plain old “statistician” would do just as well, IMO. Media companies producing their own research would be Good Thing – running analyses of Gov. data, producing supporting research for investigative series, and so on.
While I’m trashing the numeric abilities of my former colleagues in journalism, I should point out that I now work in a totally different milieu as a communication adviser to quantitative finance types. Their problem is the exact opposite – wondering why the great unwashed doesn’t get their t-stats, r-squareds and co-efficient ratios. It makes one appreciate the ability of a good journalist to get to the core of an issue quickly and explain it succintly and with clarity. So you need both – words and numbers.
Rob, I think that’s simply not true. Every decent sports journalist can do it, and we see stacks of numerical policy analysis every time a feature writer tries to explain India’s dominance in the ICC, or Qatar’s winning World Cup bid, bids for new A-League and AFL teams in Sydney and Queensland, or every sport’s bidding against everyone else for airtime, or any number of things. If I wanted anti-siphoning legislation, or telecommunications policy, or even the NBN explained to me, I’d go to the back page long before I’d go to the OPCs.
What you’re talking about is a disease specific to political journalists. It’s not that it’s ignorance, it’s that superficiality is the product they’re specialists in.
Mr. Denmore, I find the Guardian’s analyses quite woeful. It’s coverage of the Afghan war data was just poor. They basically just produce maps of numbers and leave it at that.
More generally, journalists are thick as shit. Change that and the problem might go away, but until they learn the general meaning of the words “analysis” and “investigate” why expect them to put any effort into numerical analysis or scientific investigation?
Where do we get the idea that ‘numbers are boring’? Or even that ‘numbers are mathematics’?
I hated mathematics at high school, and I was crap at it. But my numeracy is pretty good – I understand and can use to daily beneficial effect the concepts behind the numbers. Mental arithmetic, ratios, basic stats, percentages, proportions, fractions, orders of magnitude, areas & volume, domestic finance, interest, long multiplication and division mentally — it’s not real mathematics, but it’s darn useful, and interesting, in everyday life. But once you get into algebraic notation, trig, calculus, real & imaginary numbers, you’ve pretty much lost me.
Why journos overlook numeracy is beyond me. A facility with basic numeracy is essential to understanding the sensational aspects of all the big staples in journalism — crime, disasters, high finance and…sports!
Political journalists hate numbers (generally) because numbers provide proportion and sometimes that can ruin the story. The pink batts saga, that Possum so brilliantly deconstructed, was a prime example.
I was one of those kids that got reduced my maths teacher to tears because I got As in English and Ancient and Modern History, but Fs in Maths. Over the years though, I’ve got much more numerate with the aid of a calculator, and, despite not doing well in it at uni, I can analyse historical economic and accounting data, and tables etc one comes across in social history reasonably well when necessary. It was something that came with time, because from time to time it is necessary for my craft. And I actually quite enjoy ecomomic history, even writing it where its relevent to my work. But its taken me years to get to this point and sometimes I really have to struggle. And there are occasions reading this stuff when my eyes glaze over and I really have to concentrate to get it.
Not something I ever had to worry about too much when my main pre-occupation was poetry.
In my one stunt at journalism – more public relations really, where I churned out almost daily press releases for several years for the organisation I was working for – there was the occasional economic data I had to get my head around and sinplify to entertainment level, but I didn’t find it too difficult. Reckon it grows on you if you have to deal with it on a regular basis.
It’s not just political journalists:
e.g. http://www.kablambda.org/blog/2009/07/13/innumeracy-in-the-smh/
http://www.kablambda.org/blog/2010/05/17/more-smh-bashing/
Any training for the current crop of political would be a step forward, unless its training that ABC journos currently receive on how to re-write opposition press releases.
More generally, journalists are thick as shit.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
I think, apart from the lack of brains in the industry, one of the real problems is that most journalists are young and badly-trained and the topics they are forced to cover are far, far out of their understanding. People who understand policy and economics are generally working in policy and economics (with some notable exceptions).
Since my days as a regular at LP I found myself a job as a business journalist covering a fairly technical and specific area. When I first started, I was so woefully unprepared for it, and I made so many dreadful mistakes, and it was quite awful. I am sure those reading my stories often agreed.
I have a degree in Communications and I know how to write and how to craft a narrative. This, unfortunately, gives me little in the way of preparation for understanding how net present values are worked out or what the bond market really does. Now, four years later, I am somewhat better at understanding the field I’ve fallen into although I still know my limitations.
When I asked for financial training in my old job, I got a two day course that covered some of the fundamentals of the particular economic activity I cover, and that was it. Most journos wouldn’t get that.
And I daresay most media organisations do the same – throw their young and badly-trained reporters in the deep end and expect them to learn on the job, often from older reporters who’ve been through the same process.
When it comes to areas requiring some technical expertise or detailed knowledge of a sector, this approach strikes me as rather unreliable, particularly combined with the commercial pressures of running a new organisation (I know you will all pooh-pooh this, but these pressures are real and exist), plus the editorial decisions that can sway the reporting culture of a newsroom. (Exhibit a: the Australian).
Anyway, in short I’d be all in favour of much more industry-specific training for journalists, be it in business, politics, policy, environmental issues, whatever. But this takes time, money and dedication not just from individual journos but also from the organisations which employ them.
Good grief. How on earth do you all manage to read your ratings stats then?
Hooray Kate’s back!
Kate’s observations mirror my own experiences in newsrooms. Waves and waves of redundancies have torn the heart out of media organisations, leaving a top tier of rusted-on company people and a huge bottom tier of inexperienced youngsters desperate for direction.
The old middle ground of hard head sub-editors and former rounds people have quit the industry. Most of the subs now at Fairfax and News Ltd are contractors. The section heads are hugely over-worked and have time only to do the basics. Youngsters get thrown in at the deep end, often with no idea what the story is about, who the main actors are and how the industry they are reporting on actually works.
On the other side of the dividing line from these reporters are smart-as-a-tack PR people and paid communications professionals, many of whom are former journos and who know, from much experience, how to bamboozle the reporter with numbers and stats.
The young journos might have used to have worked one one or two stories a day. Now they pump it six or seven, meaning that much of what they produce are warmed-over press releases. Fred Hilmer, the former productivity commissioner, championed this approach at Fairfax – we were all “content providers” for an advertising platform.
I don’t agree that journalists are stupid, by the way. A few are, but there are stupid people in every industry/profession/craft/trade. A lot of journalists, in fact, are very smart and, by nature, tend to be jacks of all trades. You HAVE to be.
What’s missing is proper training, a respect for the audience and a return to craft principles.
Cool, Kate is back!
(sound of popping corks)
Its a long while since I have read Solzenhitsyn so the memory may be a bit fuzzy.
There is a section in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” where a character, the “Admiral” I think, refuses to accept whatsisname’s film [Battleship Potemkin?] as ‘great art’ because it is, in his opinion, ‘soviet propaganda’ and should merely and essentially be categorized as such.
His response to the objection that the director would not have been allowed to make a film that was not Soviet propaganda is to angrily retort that that simply makes the director a propagandist.
Whilst this numeracy issue is relevant and valid it is really just a fringe issue as far as the mass media is concerned.
The main problem lies elsewhere as Adrian at #14 has illustrated and as the thread a few days ago about lefty blogs being captured by rightist consensus also illustrated.
Off topic but I think this illustrates just how egregious the state of news reporting here down under has become: since 1994 there’s been a growing grass roots movement in the USA which has had a lot of success getting city councils and state governments to enact laws requiring employers to pay a living wage to their employees. Over 140 municipalities in the US already have such ordinances. First time I heard about this was this morning through Club Troppo.
Nothing in the MSM. As far as they’re concerned, the only grass roots political movement in the USA is the Tea Party.
Of course, this accusation might be unfair. Maybe everyone’s known about the living wage movement for years and I’ve just been very slow in noticing it.
Thanks Mr Denmore for your latest post re “prime minister under pressure” – says who?
I find the descriptions of reports by some reporters are confusing. Numbers dance for me and innumerate numbskulls obscure and slant the results. I am pretty p*ssed off when the journalist hasn’t the courtesy to link to the orginal report.
Back on topic: Besides remedial numeracy for journalists, I think remedial English for subbies is <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-second-last-straw-in-affordable-housing-market-rankings-worldwide-20110123-1a18f.html"urgently needed too:
That headline is just bathetic.
Mercurius @ 10
Its really just a level of proficiency in numeracy that everyone who manages to escape from high school should have.
Just enough calculus to be able to resolve Zeno’s paradoxes, I should say.
Unfortunately all my books is packed away for moving so I can’t check out the Kirk, Raven and Schofield account of Zeno’s 4 paradoxes. So all I can say is that you need more than calculus to be able to resolve them. You need a bit of Cantorian set theory too. Zeno’s paradoxes are very good examples of argument by reductio ad absurdam.
Oh, I dunno Gummo.
That one claiming “motion is impossible” because first the arrow has to reach half-way, and before that it must travel a quarter of the way, and ….
can be resolved by seeing that
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ….. ,
athough it is the sum of infinitely many terms, actually converges to a FINITE result (namely, 1).
‘Summing infinite series’ often comes within calculus courses, because of the link to Taylor series.
Not that I’d expect journalists to be concerned with such arcana.
Let’s split the difference and have an infinitesimal amount of calculus. There are limits.
d
@28
Oh well done that boy.
Ambigulous @ 27:
That’s why I need my Kirk, Raven & Schofield*: they give a pretty good account of the paradoxes and what Zeno was at when he wrote them. That account, BTW, differs radically from Kirk & Raven’s account of what Zeno was up to: after they added Schofiled to the team their interpretation of the paradoxes changed.
Refuting Zeno’s paradoxes is a little like refuting the various ontological arguments for the existence of God. You can do it, but not to the satisfaction of the ontological arguer.If the ontological arguer is the devil’s advocate in your own head that’s a bit of a bugger – you can’t just say “Ah, stuff it!” and walk away.
* Yes, I know, I’ve linked to an on-line version of the book but I prefer to do my thinking about the pre-Socratics in hard copy.
Thanks Gummo and special thanks to Darryl
BTW, old Archimedes was a dab hand at handling infinitesimals, all done with panache before calculus.
There you go, like we said, a bit of useful maths.
Ben Cubby has no idea what sells newspapers, and nor does anyone else who has worked in a field where sales and credibility have been in slow decline. If you can’t describe what’s happening in an interesting way, maybe journalism isn’t for you and the regular culls that the MSM does from time to time is less of a tragedy than might appear at first.
OK, Andrew E, and I do respect your perspective – therefore, how can one make the numbers sexy?
There’s a clear interest on the part of media moguls to hire journalists with poor numeracy skills.
For instance, if journalists were more numerate, many would work out how little they are paid and jump ship to other professions, where creative writing is valued and supported.
Also journalists would finally understand how much traditional media circulations are in decline and look for growth industries instead.
Either way media moguls would lose their lowly paid, lifetime journalists and subeditors, forcing their costs to rise at a time when they can least afford it.
Nieman today suggests universities need to train a new breed of journo-programmers.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/01/dave-winer-how-can-universities-educate-journo-programmers/
Craig Thomler @35:
This might sound bitchy, but is actually a comment on my ignorance: What professions pay better than journalism for ‘creative writing’?
d
Darryl at 37, public relations, corporate communications, media adviser to politicians, advertising copywriting – all pay more than journalism.
It is highly desirable that journos, among others, need to have an “understanding” of statistics. But they don’t need to understand “how” to do statistics. For example, journos should understand confidence limits, what affects them and what this means in terms of a poll of 1000 people. They also need to understand that there is a complicated method that the numerate can use – but they don’t have to be able to use this method.
Fine @3 captured the problem when he said:
Problem is when mathematical types run a course on statistics they will be trying to keep themselves employed for a semester and will focus on the maths and the how. They probably won’t be much good at teaching the bits that are meaningful to journos. A much shorter on how to detect (and tell?) lies using statistics would have been a lot more relevant
Ditto for a lot of courses aimed at people who are never going to work in a profession.
John, I’d agree up to a point, but learning how to run a t-test or two a) isn’t rocket science, and b) helps to gain that “understanding” you talk about.
It’s not just about inferential stats, either.
Robert: “Running a t-test or two” is a nice to have that pads out a course and scares numeracy limited arts students into a state of dull bewilderment. It is more productive to ask “what does a journo really need to know?” and designing a course to suit. If they really need to run t tests they can find a recipe and do so.
There are just too many courses that have far too much unproductive padding.
John D @ 39
The problem with running a short course on “how to pick/tell lies with statistics” is that the only way to pick the lies is to understand how the statistics should be applied properly. I think it might be difficult to have ‘stats without the analysis’. Maybe a cheat sheet along the lines of “if you apply this test, then these assumptions must be satisfied”, although that might require more thinking about the story from the journos than they are prepared to give!
By the way, mathematics is not the same things as statistics or numeracy. Mathematics is a highly creative subject that is only tangentially related to numbers, and more concerned with thinking efficiently and effectively about problems.
I think that if high school curricula could communicate more of the creative spark that mathematics requires, we would loose less creative kids who currently think maths is just a lesser form of accounting.
Jess @42: I found mathematics the most intellectually stretching of all the things I studied. However, the reality is that very few people, including engineers, actually directly use much of what is taught. As an engineer the real benefits came from the stretching of the mind and development of general skills in the manipulation of numbers and formulae.
It is also a subject where aptitude seems to make much more difference than it does for any other subject I have studied. So just because you found stats a doddle doesn’t mean the average journo is the same.
If i were teaching someone to do state working through examples is an obvious can be an effective method. But teaching what to someone without the aptitude? The arts mind may do far better at understanding the concept without being confused by numbers and formulae. If they really do need to calculate something they will probably use a table or spreadsheet provided by someone who has the necessary skills.
John,
I think maths lends itself to a certain type of thinker (i.e. those good at thinking in abstract terms) but I’m not sure that it’s immune from the doctrine of hard work. Most mathematicians I know were good at it at school but not brilliant, and I think that a lot of kids get put off maths because they get told that ‘they don’t have the aptitude for it’. It’s disappointing because school kids don’t really get the chance to see what mathematics is really all about, and the result is a mathematically-illiterate adult population.
You said:
I would respectfully disagree – this sort of learning works well for some but probably not for your average journo, and many of the comments here suggest that ‘arts students’ (for want of a better term) are put off because of this learning tactic. We train our kids to jump through hoops of applying derivatives and limits without these things really being useful. How many posters here can remember how to calculate the sine of an angle? We emphasise the boring parts which are of no use and skip all the really interesting mind-opening parts that would actually be vital in developing critical thinkers for our society.
However trying to teach mathematics without the numbers and formulae is pretty difficult. The skill of a great maths teacher is to de-emphasise the formulae and numbers in favour of mathematical understanding. I know that most teachers are stuck teaching to the curriculum, but how much better for the students (and upcoming journos) would it be if we allowed some time for exploration of mathematics in the school classroom, rather than ramming SOH CAH TOA/t-tests/mean calculations etc down their throats?
I’m going to finish this little rant with a small digression:
That’s the start of a very interesting article by mathematician Paul Lockhart
(link to PDF here), which contrasts the way we teach mathematics at school with the way we teach the arts. It’s very well written and I think it’s worth reading – especially with the new national curriculum being designed soon.
Robert @40:
Learning to run t-tests (and other standardised tests) is how I remember learning “biostats” when I got my totally useless scientist’s licence. It wasn’t until I had the good fortune to get a good lecturer in Applied Stats while taking a second degree that I understood the basis of statistical inference.
That lecturer began with a simple question: suppose we suspect a die is loaded in favour of rolling a one – how can we test that? Some smart arse in the class piped up “That’s easy, you use a chi-squared test.”
The lecturer’s reply was “No, you don’t use a chi-squared test. That’s unnecessary.” He then went on to explain how the test could be done using binomial probabilities. For the first time, statistics started to make sense to me and I was able to start taking an approach that wasn’t based on following the standard recipe.
Jesse @44: I had enough maths aptitude to get through the maths needed for an engineering degree without much work. However, I know on kid whose aptitude level was sufficient for me to stop talking to him about maths before he was out of primary school because it was just too embarrassing. It was not because he knew stuff I didn’t – it was because he could grasp ideas and see implications faster than I could recall the stuff I knew. And he wasn’t the best of the best by any means. Hence the comment about aptitude. I don’t have this problem with any other subject I can think of.
My guess is that it would take less than 1/2 day to run a short course on polling that would teach journos all they need to know about stats and polling methods.