By Nicola Raymond, Senior Consultant
“It’s what some call xxx, and others agree.”
I recently came across this sentence as part of an opinion editorial in a major Australian newspaper and found myself immediately infuriated by its vagueness.
Who are the “some” and these “others” that agree? And how many of them are there?
It’s something that I’ve encountered all too often in newspapers, and each time I see it, it brings me back to a pet topic of mine: detailed statistics.
I didn’t excel at mathematics in school, but I do love statistics. Any statistic that backs-up a claim and offers a comparative analysis appeals to me.
For example, I recently read that the Australian beef industry plays an important role in Australia’s society and economy.
I didn’t find that information alone particularly informative, so I did some statistical research, and here’s what I found.
“There are 27 million head of beef cattle in Australia. The total area operated by beef farms is 332 million hectares, which is 43% of Australia’s total land mass. Australia is the second-largest exporter of beef in the world, behind Brazil.”
This gave me a framework for understanding and accepting that the Australian beef industry is, indeed, important to the nation’s society and its economy.
Often we need statistical comparisons to help to get a message across.
For example, the statement “Australians consume an average 32.5 kilograms per capita of beef annually” gives us a statistic. But what does it mean? We need a comparison with other countries to understand this.
Finding out, then, that “Australians consume 32.5kg per capita of beef annually, compared with 17kg per person in the UK and 63kg per person in Argentina,” gives me the information I need to make sense of this consumption.
Sometimes, without statistical evidence, a story can seem fabricated or discriminatory, the source appearing to make arbitrary claims, even though what they say may be true.
The bottom line: messages in the media are often conveyed through long lines of communication. In order that a message is interpreted and passed on, statistical evidence is one way of achieving cut-through.
I call it commonsense.
