Why is the media so sloppy in their use of numbers? Yesterday there was a story on RTE about planning hearings for the proposed metro. At the end of the story RTE said:

…the Cabinet will have to find the money and assess if the project justifies the billions, particularly when passenger numbers are projected to fall by 300,000 due to the recession.

The problem here is that 300,000 is a meaningless number. Any time someone gives you a single number like this, on it’s own, with no context then they have told you nothing.

In this case RTE have not told us over what time span the 300,000 will drop (per month, per year, over 10 years?), or more importantly what the total number of passengers will be. It is only when you know the total can you assess whether 300,000 really is a significant number. The Luas carries about 90,000 people per day, or over 30 million per year. A 300,000 rider drop there would be only 1% which is hardly significant.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Throw some single number out there, not to inform, but to shock. And that is the crux of what is going on here. Most journalists aren’t stupid. They could give enough data to allow you to be properly informed. But when they give you just one number, what they really are doing is trying to manipulate how you are thinking. In the interest of a better “story” of course.