In university studying economics, one of the tough little mandatory courses I had to take was one called “statistics”, which nearly every college student has to take no matter what their area of study.
The study of “Journalism” apparently doesn’t require it, however.
I just read this funny blog entry at the great Human Events Online‘s Right Noise blog, by Mac Johnson:
[…] Consider this Associated Press Story out of Houston, widely disseminated after being linked on The Drudge Report, and reporting that 53 evacuees have died in Texas.
These deaths were scattered over several cities but were all dutifully tallied with the clear implication that the Hurricane and its ensuing evacuation continue to claim lives a full two weeks after the floods. Sadly, the deaths included many elderly, one of whom dropped dead in the parking lot of the Astrodome.
There’s just one problem with reporting these deaths as unusual: most aren’t. As noted in the same story, there are 240,000 evacuees in Texas right now. Given the United States’ average death rate of 8.25 per thousand per year, that means we could expect that (in the two weeks time since the flood) approximately 76 Texas evacuees should have died from normal causes. After all, people die everyday, everywhere.
How, then, is 53 dead a continuing news story? Even if the statewide search of medical examiners missed 23 dead, the death rate is not above average.
Apparently, bad news is where you find it. Or maybe, this is what happens when we allow people to receive journalism degrees without taking a basic statistics course.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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