To my mind, nothing embarrasses a newspaper more than a lack of vigilance over statistics—what I’ve taken in recent blog posts to calling “numerical illiteracy.” One egregious offender is the New York Times.
To bolster his case, Emanuel passed along statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he said “show rapid increases in S.T.D.’s among older people.” Between 2007 and 2011, he reported, “chlamydia infections among Americans 65 and over increased by 31 percent, and syphilis by 52 percent.” Emanuel said these numbers paralleled “S.T.D. trends in the 20- to 24-year-old age group, where chlamydia increased by 35 percent and syphilis by 64 percent.”
Earlier in January I marveled on the Reader‘s blog, the Bleader, at a Times story that claimed black women in Tennessee die of breast cancer at a rate 14 times that of white women (the correct ratio was 1.64 black women per white woman). The mistake came back to bite the Times, which ran a correction a few days later. Other statistics in the original story made it clear where the number 14 came from and what it actually represented. But how could such a preposterous number have reached print in the first place? (I asked the Times‘s public editor in an e-mail, but she didn’t get back to me.)
