{"id":812,"date":"2008-10-22T09:56:32","date_gmt":"2008-10-22T13:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=812"},"modified":"2008-12-11T12:20:07","modified_gmt":"2008-12-11T16:20:07","slug":"greenbergs-law-of-the-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2008\/10\/22\/greenbergs-law-of-the-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Greenberg&#8217;s Law of the Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Greenberg&#8217;s Law of the Media states that &#8220;if a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The law is best understood by seeing examples of it in practice.<\/p>\n<p>To this end, I am going to start posting examples that I find.\u00a0 I have also created a category on this blog so that you can easily find the examples.<\/p>\n<p>Follow <a title=\"Washington Post article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/10\/21\/AR2008102102477.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&amp;sub=AR\" target=\"_blank\">this link<\/a> to the first example from the Washington Post web site. The following paragraph from the article is the example:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>From shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks to last year, U.S. defense spending rose from 3 to 4 percent of gross domestic product, but it remains far below the 45-year average of 5.5 percent. The Pentagon&#8217;s budget for fiscal 2009 is $527 billion, a figure that does not include Iraq and Afghanistan war costs, which have totaled more than $800 billion since 2001.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Are they saying that our defense spending is less than the 45-year average when you don&#8217;t count the amount that would put it above that average? I think that is what&#8217;s known as a tautology.<\/p>\n<p>This kind of accounting has become standard practice in business.\u00a0 &#8220;Company XYZ made a profit when you exclude certain items.&#8221;\u00a0 Those items being the ones that show the company did not make a profit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greenberg&#8217;s Law of the Media states that &#8220;if a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.&#8221; The law is best understood by seeing examples of it in practice. To this end, I am going to start posting examples that I find.\u00a0 I have also created a category on this blog [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165,7,166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-greenbergs-law-of-the-media","7":"category-periodic-posts","8":"category-stevegsposts","9":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1287,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions\/1287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}