By weary I mean to not take any given quoted statistic quite so literally, don’t get me wrong, statistics are an important part of how we make decisions. Businesses rely on them to make a profit, the insurance industry, social media, etc.
Statistics Defined
- A branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data.
- A collection of quantitative data.
- A branch of mathematics dealing with the collection and study of numerical data also a collection of such numerical data.
To best illustrate this I present these two articles: Giffords Report on CDC Data and The Trace: Gun violence 2021.
The headline for the Giffords story: A Devastating Toll: 2021 CDC Data Shows Record Number of Gun Deaths, Makes Clear the Need for Continued Action to Address Gun Violence in America.
Vs.
The headline from The Trace: Gun Violence in 2021, By the Numbers
The Giffords article goes on to state that, “CDC data suggests nearly 49,000 people died from gun violence,” while The Trace states, “The facts and figures that stuck with us.” The primary difference between these two media sources is that Giffords is clearly agenda driven and wants the reader to draw one conclusion, The Trace simply reports the facts and allows the reader to make up their own mind.
Both link back to their sources but in terms of thoroughness, The Trace did a better job of reporting and using multiple sources, Kudos to the journalist for The Trace article. Giffords use only one source that showed only what they wanted to show and nothing else.
Giffords did nothing specifically wrong, their source is credible in that it (the CDC) reported 49,000(actually 48.830) gun deaths, but then Giffords implies that the 49,000 gun deaths were due to gun violence and counts suicide as part of the gun violence. But the strongest criticism of this article is that the linked source is just a search form for the CDC data. Leaving the reader if they were so inclined to see for themselves to figure out the interface and the terms used. There was no direct access to the data that represented their interpretations. The data in the opinion of Disgruntled News and this editor is that they misrepresented and obfuscated the data.
If one were to change the grouping on the request form to 15 leading causes of death and keep the firearm as the injury mechanism then we see a different picture.
As you can see, now you can see how each of those gun deaths occurred, but Giffords does not show any of that data.
The Trace on the other hand, specifically excludes suicides as gun violence and uses the Gun Violence Archive as its primary source and is upfront about what their quoted statistic includes. The journalist here did an excellent job of reporting the facts and did not try to obfuscate or misrepresent the data.
In this example, two very different articles on the same topic made use of statistics, one did not show any data but made inferences that the data they used showed a specific conclusion while not giving direct access to the data and representing the data in a manner that is not necessarily correct. The other did not infer that the data showed a specific conclusion, and had direct access to the data that it showed and used multiple sources compared to the other’s one.
So let me leave you with this question: If you were trying to research Gun Violence, which article would you find more accurate and informative?