It Adds Up To Incompetence
I've said for years that journalists generally suck at math - and regularly expose journalists' math incompetence on this blog. I recently noted the work of Donald Luskin exposing either bias or incompetence at the New York Times in reporting on whether CSX had paid corporate income tax under the leadership of CEO John Snow, President Bush's choice to become the nation's next Treasury Secretary. Now there is academic research backing up my contention that journalistic coverage of business and other stories where basic math is involved is often filled with errors.

A content analysis of the Vancouver Sun newspaper and a math quiz administered to journalism students at the University of B.C. revealed that both working reporters and journalism students have waded in - and they are drowning in the numbers. They have difficulty performing simple mathematical calculations, they struggle to contextualize data and they disengage their critical faculties when it comes to numbers. It is not that the math that they must use is rocket-science - in fact most involves no more than elementary or high school math - it is simply that they refuse to ask, "Does this make sense?"