{"id":2050,"date":"2016-04-13T21:39:06","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T21:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/?p=2050"},"modified":"2016-04-13T21:39:06","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T21:39:06","slug":"journalism-and-data-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/2016\/04\/journalism-and-data-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism and data literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This post by Carla Pedrete is titled Common mistakes journalists make when using statistics<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, but I’d wager most statements wouldn’t be less true if extended to the general population (emphases mine):<\/p>\n

Political parties and corporations use statistics to defend or justify particular interests. Hence, it is indispensable\u00a0that journalists\u00a0analyse\u00a0numbers as deeply as they analyse words<\/strong>. David Sibert adds that it is socially unacceptable to\u00a0admit that one is\u00a0poor at reading or spelling, but\u00a0people\u00a0will proudly boast: \u201cI\u2019m no good at maths\u201d<\/strong>. Journalists could actually use their position to help stop numerical illiteracy. (…) For Maria Ottati,\u00a0the main problem is media\u00a0talk\u00a0about\u00a0risks without taking into account the amount of people affected<\/strong>. For instance, the headline \u201cEating food X doubles the risk of developing cancer type Y\u201d could be correct, but the article must explain that \u201ccancer type Y is extremely rare and the risk of developing it is 1 in 100 million, so that a 50% increase is pretty meaningless\u201d. (…) Paul Kingswell notes how journalists\u00a0analyse a trend through the\u00a0highest\/lowest rates nationally, but without contextualising the data<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other topics: percents versus percentage points, the use of absurd formula to impress, not rounding numbers. Indeed, as a supposedly empowered and informed society we have a long way to go to spread and deepen data literacy, a key skill for this century.<\/p>\n

You know, reproducible data-driven journalism workflows, newspapers with GitHub accounts, R and Python repos, Jupyter notebooks. They’re all good. But I have the gnawing feeling we miss the mark of what is needed by the majority of people so tremendously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post by Carla Pedrete is titled Common mistakes journalists make when using statistics, but I’d wager most statements wouldn’t be less true if extended to the general population (emphases mine): Political parties and corporations use statistics to defend or justify particular interests. Hence, it is indispensable\u00a0that journalists\u00a0analyse\u00a0numbers as deeply as they analyse words. David … Continue reading Journalism and data literacy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[194,141],"class_list":["post-2050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-note","tag-data-literacy","tag-ddj"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/bifurcation.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pPwF-x4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2050"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2054,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050\/revisions\/2054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}