The PBS story,  Mindless Budget Reporting: Fooling Some of the People All of the Time by Dean Baker talks about an example of Greenberg’s Law of The Media. Baker is castigating a report in The New York Times.

“A plan by House leaders to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program — twice the amount of cuts proposed in a House bill that failed in June — threatens to derail efforts by the House and Senate to work together to complete a farm bill before agriculture programs expire on Sept. 30.”

The problem with this description of the Republican plan is that the proposed cut of $40 billion is supposed to be over a 10-year budget window, not a single year. (The Republicans want to cut the food stamp budget by 5 percent, not 50 percent.) This information is not reported anywhere in the article. As a result, even a very intelligent and extremely knowledgeable person like Krugman could read through the piece and be off by a factor of 10 in his understanding of the size of the proposed cuts.

One of the ways Greenberg’s Law is demonstrated is to give us a number out of context. You are obviously supposed to infer that the number illustrates some point that the reporter is implying, but you are never given the context to judge whether the desired inference is correct.  It is unlikely that the reporter knows whether the desired inference is correct.

Baker is correct that all you know is that it is a large number.  If you don’t know whether it is over 1 year or 10, or what fraction it is of the budget, or how this government spending compares to the spending of the corporate sector under similar circumstances, then you have no idea if the number is too large, too small, or just about right.  However, your thinking about the matter has been prejudiced by the report.  Because of this, you might come away from reading or hearing the story with less knowledge than you started with.

Sort of like all of Faux Noise, the more you watch, the less you know.

The Boston Globe story State reports few problems with voter ID law is a good example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media.

The overwhelming majority of voters who cast ballots this year in Rhode Island had no problems complying with a new voter identification law. Secretary of State Ralph Mollis’s office reported Friday that of 560,000 ballots cast in this year’s elections fewer than 190 provisional ballots were submitted because the voter failed to present a driver’s license, bus pass, or other form of ID. Lawmakers passed the law last year to prevent voter fraud.

This proves that 190 people who had no ID still attempted to vote despite the law.  It does not tell you how many people decided not to vote because they did not have the required ID.  If these people without ID who did not vote were otherwise legally eligible to vote, then I would say that these were problems.  We have no idea of how many such people there were.  So while the story appears to be true that the state reported few problems, that does not mean that there were only a few problems.  In fact there is no report of the state trying to measure how many problems there were.  It is very likely that you will not find what you do not seek.

I predict that the “information” published in this article will be used as a means to justify the continuation of the voter ID law. Perhaps a better headline would be the one I used for this article.

The New Republic has the article More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You “Rape Can’t Get You Pregnant”.

It’s fine for magazines to debunk the pseudo-science of people in the news, but they shouldn’t use pseudo-science in one of their arguments.

In the section  titled “Legalizing abortion didn’t make abortion safer” they quoted Dr. Willke  as saying:

“If, in fact, the elimination of illegal abortion eliminated back alleys, there should have been a perceptible drop in the number of women dying. That didn’t happen. The line didn’t even blip from 1967 to 1973 and 1974. … It just kept going down at the same slow rate. There was no evidence of a decline in mortality from legalization.”

Then to disprove what he said the article posits:

In any event, evidence that his claim was totally bunk was readily available by 1989. In March of 1987, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study which read, in part, “Between 1972 and 1982 … [t]he overall death rate resulting from legal abortion dropped nearly fivefold, from 4.1 per 100,000 abortions in 1972 to 0.8 in 1982.”

In one case, Dr. Willke talks about the number of women dying.  In the other case they quote the death rate per 100,000 abortions.  Now if the death rate went down, but the number of abortions went up, then it is quite possible that the total number of deaths of women did not go down.

I am not saying that this is true.  I am just saying that people should not use arguments that are so easily ripped apart.  The New Republic is trying to show that Dr. Willke doesn’t know science, but they don’t show a great grasp of science themselves, or at least not statistics, math, or even numbers.

Chalk up another example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

You might find the rest of the article more enlightening.  Too bad they had to spoil it with this blunder.

The Kansas City Star has the generally good article Doctors dispute Akin’s claim, but some supporters say it was misunderstood.

If you are wondering about the supporters’ claims to a misunderstanding,

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon adds a new wrinkle, but then goes back to repeat the same stupid statement that got Akin in trouble in the first place.

The part of the article that gets my goat is the statement:

A 1996 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, generally considered one of the few peer-reviewed research efforts on this subject, estimated that 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancy.

The above statement tells you nothing about the truth or falsity of the claims of either side.  To complete the above half a statistic, there would need to be a statement like, “and it is estimated that X percent of incidents of consensual intercourse result in pregnancy.”  If X is significantly higher than 5%, then there could conceivably (no pun intended) be some truth to Akin’s claim.  If X is significantly lower than 5%, then it might be true that rape has an enhanced rate of causing pregnancy.  If X is not significantly different from 5%, then it might be tru that rape versus consensual sex has no affect on the rate of pregnancy after the act.

So the half statistic has shown that rape may lead to enhanced rates of pregnancy, or it might lead to lowered rates of pregnancy, or it might have no effect at all.  In other words, you don’t know anymore about the effect of rape on pregnancy than you did before you read that statistic. You don’t even learn anything about the claim to rarity.  Without knowing the number X, you can’t say whether 5% means rare or frequent.

For this reason, I give the article a 5 star rating for proving Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”