Today's journalism is riddled with errors.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

DESPITE all the rhetoric from Thomas Jefferson to the latest self-important musings of journalists about journalism's being the best hope for a healthy polity, your newspaper often is lying. While assuring readers that it provides precise information about public policy issues, in many cases it only is pushing speculation and rumor in the guise of fact. Most of the time, there is no independent way to confirm its claims, so how can you tell when a newspaper is lying?

Here's a hint--watch out for the numbers. While newspapers are filled with contextless reports of the latest things government officials have said or decided, they like to throw in a number now and then to add verisimilitude to the tales they tell.

Knowledge of the media's inability to get it straight, especially when dealing with statistics, has become widespread enough to inspire Cynthia Crossen's recent book, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. It also has given rise to a new magazine, the quarterly Forbes MediaCritic.

While ideologues of all persuasions like to blame media inaccuracies on political biases, the causes of journalism's troubles are inherent in the way daily newspapers are written. They are prepared hurriedly and by generalists who, even if they are unfailingly scrupulous (which can't always be assumed), often are ignorant of the topics on which they write and depend blindly on what others tell them--and what others tell them very frequently is biased.

Americans, intellectual culture is drunk on numbers, even addicted to them. They need them in every situation, and feel utterly dependent on them. As sociologist Richard Gelles aptly put it in a July 25, 1994, Newsweek story on the media's problems with numbers, "Reporters don't ask, ,How do you know it?, They're on deadline. They just want the figures so they can go back to their word processors." The culture of the poll dominates--the foolish notion that not only every fact, but every thought, whim, and emotion of the populace can be stated in scientifically valid and valuable numbers.

The lust for numbers, at its best, can lead people to do hard research and dig up interesting and useful information. More often, though, it results in dignifying guesses with misleadingly precise figures. For instance, it wasn't enough to know that people were dying in Somalia; as Michael Maren reported in the Forbes MediaCritie (Fall 1994), reporters felt it necessary to latch onto some relief workers, guesses and repeat them over and over, only occasionally letting slip honest acknowledgments that no one really knew how many people actually were dying and that no one was taking the trouble to attempt accurate counts.

The obsession with numbers leads to particularly egregious errors in reports on economic figures and aggregates and the Federal budget. Those errors include calling spending that doesn't equal what had been planned a "cut," even if more is being spent than the year before; relying on static economic analysis, especially when calculating the effects of tax increases and their concomitant revenues (because they assume that people do not change their behavior when their taxes are raised, members of Congress and reporters make grievously wrong predictions about expected revenues); and relying uncritically on numerical tools such as the Consumer Price Index.

Especially during the 1992 election, "quintile" analysis (dividing the population into equal fifths) of the effects of the Reagan Bush years on income and tax-burden equality abounded, with hardly any explanation of the complications of such analyses. Those complications include the fact that, when people in lower income quintiles become richer, they often move into a higher quintile, rather than buoy the average of the lower one. Yet, income added to the highest quintile can do nothing but increase its average income. That creates a misleading picture of the rich getting much richer while the poor stagnate.

Quintile analysis also is static, but income mobility is common in America, so it is not always the same people who languish in lower quintiles or remain at the top. Moreover, quintile analysis often relies on households, not individuals--the top quintile can have more than 20% of Americans; the bottom, less than 20%. Nevertheless, all of those complications are overlooked in the media's craving for numbers to toss around.

The media even ignore the fact that "counts" of macroeconomic variables can change...