The news business does not do well with numbers. But, some would say the news is full of numbers. And technically that is true. Many news stories feature graphs and charts that are full of very precise very accurate numbers. But the numbers in these graphs and charts aren't really important. Instead what is going on is a "cool graphic". The modern news business is almost entirely about pictures and a "cool graphic" is an effective kind of visual. But so is a picture of a scantily clad starlet. Now I like to gaze fondly at scantily clad starlets so I am all for this sort of thing. But I don't confuse pictures of scantily clad starlets with news. And I bet that if a news producer has the choice between a scantily clad starlet and a cool graphic to illustrate a story the starlet will win 100 times out of 100. So what's important about the cool graphic is not the numbers its the coolness.
And thus I introduce numbers. I use the number "100" above, twice. How important was the specific number I picked? Not very. What I needed was a number that was "big" but not incredibly big. And I am using the word "incredibly" in the sense where it measures how believable something is. In this example "big" was important, I was going for "impact". But credibility was also important. I wanted you to believe what I said. If I had used 1000 instead of 100 I would have gained bigness but lost believability. 100 seemed like the right balance between a number big enough to get impact but not so big to lose believability. And this is a long windy way of demonstrating that the psychological impact of a number is important.
Amping up the psychological impact is incredibly important in the news business. One simple strategy is to use a big number instead of a small number. This plays out by consulting an "expert" who has an ax to grid and who will provide you with an exaggerated estimate of how likely, big, or important something is. If expert #1, who actually is an expert, says "nothing to worry about" and expert #2, who is more interested in shilling for his cause than in enlightenment, says "be afraid, be very afraid", guess who gets lots of air time and who does not. And news producers go into orgasms if they can get two dueling "experts", one saying "it's very very very red" and the other saying "its very very very blue". It doesn't matter that a real expert might say "its mildly green".
This strategy works best in areas where the average audience member doesn't know much about the subject. So we have seen a lot of this surrounding the tragedy in Japan, particular the nuclear problems. Radiation exposure is such a subject. Scientists have gotten very good at measuring radioactivity very accurately. Theoretically, people should know a lot about this subject. It has been a matter of intense public interest since at least 1945, when A-bombs were dropped on Japan. But most of the public discussion has been on a level with my red/blue example above. Over the years the pro-nuclear camp has been saying "no danger here" and the anti-nuclear camp has been saying "any tiny amount of radiation is extremely dangerous". The facts support the green position. We live in a sea of low level radiation. It is literally everywhere. So there are things to worry about but a lot of the "scare" coverage is exaggerated.
The "radiation" story out of Japan is one where there is at least some justification for a difference of opinion. And at least some segments of the media are trying to clarify the situation rather than obscure it. But it is an aspect of the story where these is some justification for the media's actions. Unfortunately, there are many other aspects of the Japan story that illustrate the media's complete inability to deal properly with numbers.
This comes out most strikingly with respect to casualty numbers. The media is very good at conveying the difference between zero and one. A story in which no one dies is covered very differently than a story in which one person dies. The first story becomes a "miracle rescue" story, like the miners in Chile. The second story becomes a "Law and Order" story; who died, who did it, etc. That's OK. But what about where in one case one person dies and in the other case two people die. Given our zero/one example one would think that the coverage would be completely different. But the media coverage is only slightly different. Now it's an "individual" versus a "group" story. But the coverage of the two stories will be not very different.
Moving on, what about a two casualty story versus a ten casualty story? The difference should be large. In the latter case, eight extra people are dead. And remember the death of the one person in the "one death" story was important enough to justify coverage. But the coverage is almost identical. Recently a bus crashed in New Jersey killing 2. This happened within a few days of the Bronx bus crash that killed more than ten. There has been a little more coverage of the Bronx crash but the media approach to each crash has been more similar than different.
This inability to differentiate gets even more pronounced as the numbers get bigger. What if 100 people are killed? Is this different than only 10 people getting killed. No! The media will either choose to cover the story or it won't. If both stories are covered they will both be "a lot of people were killed" stories. The death toll in Japan has crossed 10,000, as I write this. It is expected to continue to rise. The final total will likely pass 20,000. But in the end about one person will be killed in the Japan tragedy for every ten people who perished in Haiti under roughly similar circumstances. The media is completely incapable of differentiating in any meaningful sense between these two numbers. But the difference is hundreds of thousands of lives.
The media has fallen into the "up close and personal" trap. For disasters they show "devastation" video. With their close in emphasis it all looks pretty much the same. They have not figured out how to convey the extent of the devastation. If they have enough devastation video to fill up a "clip loop" it all looks the same. You get a number of short clips, usually about 10, each showing a piece of devastation. The same clip loop is run over and over. So once you have enough devastation to make up the ten short shots all disasters look the same. All disasters are visually boiled down to the clip loop and all clip loops end up looking pretty much the same.
The human toll is handled in a similar manner. We get interviews of survivors or people who knew a victim. Again about 10 of these interviews is all the media can absorb. So if a disaster generates 10 interviewees or millions of interviewees it is all the same. But a disaster which creates 10 interviewees is not the same as a disaster that generates millions of interviewees. But it will be pretty much impossible to tell one disaster from the other based on the media coverage.
Several years ago an earthquake hit my city. Within a few hours the media had put together their clip loop of the event. That's when the calls and e-mails started coming in. Was I OK? Was my home, car, or place of business wiped out in the terrible devastation? How many friends had been killed or seriously injured? That sort of thing. In fact, no one I knew was killed, injured, or even had suffered any property damage. Because no one was killed and only a few people were injured. There was serious damage to a few specific areas but 99% of the city was completely undamaged. You couldn't tell any of this because the national media picked up the same highlight loop showing the few instances of damage and ran it over and over.
Shortly thereafter 9/11 happened. 9/11 was a much bigger event involving thousands of deaths, and much more property damage than my little earthquake. 9/11 looked like a bigger event than the earthquake in my town. And it has received vastly more coverage, partly because it happened in a media mecca. But it is literally impossible to accurately gage the size and scope of the two events based solely on the media coverage. Numbers might help. But, as I have shown, the media is not good with numbers.
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