A very nice double piece from Slate in fictional journalism;Numbers Are Hard To Come By
What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.
By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, at 5:02 PM ET

In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."

Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknowns—news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance—in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."
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But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. …"

Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it—or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"—into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.
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In 2006, Jack Shafer looked at the estimates of how many words H.L. Mencken wrote in his career. In 2010, he asked Tim Shriver to get off Rahm Emanuel's case for using the word retard as a pejorative.

Not every journalist who uses the phrase should be shot. For example, a reporter has my blessing to use it when he needs to acknowledge that the precise number of illegal immigrants is not known because, after all, illegal immigrants refuse to sit still for a census. Likewise, a story about the size of the historical cinema box office can get away with using it because accurate records weren't kept in the old days. But even then, he should say, "The numbers haven't been tabulated" instead of they're "hard to find," because "hard to find" implies that if he had only looked harder, he would have found them.
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But these are the exceptions. Usually when a journalist drops the phrase into his story it's because 1) he couldn't be bothered to find the number; 2) nobody has tabulated the number because nobody cares, and if the reporter writes that, he'll undermine the thesis of his piece; or 3) the story's editor insisted at the 11th hour on a number and the fudge phrase was the only thing that could be plugged into the hole.

Numbers are hard to come by pops up in lots of bogus trend stories, that genre of journalistic fraud that I've savaged repeatedly in this column. In bogus trend pieces, the phrase is almost a "tell," signaling that the publication knows that it's guilty of trying to document something as a trend when only the loosest anecdotal evidence exists to support the idea. In nonbogus trend stories, journalists use the phrase to caulk over gaps in their reporting.

Among the things whose enumeration was too difficult to pin down in 2010 were wood-fired hot-tub sales figures (New York Times, Oct. 21), the global sales of video games (New York Times, Sept. 20), dollars spent on tailgate parties (Kansas City Star, Sept. 25), the number of golfers on high-school teams (Boston Globe, April 15), the size of Brazil's acai export market (New York Times, Feb. 24), and the number of 3-D cinema screens (USA Today, Feb. 2).

Going back to 2009, the press used the dodge while discussing the number of flip-flop sandals produced (International Herald Tribune, Dec. 9); the size of the e-book reader business (New York Times, Oct. 7); sales of Nancy Drew books (New York Times, July 19); the cost of building transmission lines for wind farms east of the Rockies (Chicago Tribune, May 5); the size of Hispanic representation in corporate boardrooms, senior management, and economic-development organizations (Plain Dealer, April 19); the number of fishermen who have left the occupation (USA Today, April 9); and the number of coffee-shop employees nationally (Boston Globe, Jan. 22).

And in 2008, it was used to couch the known unknown-ness of the declining costs of solar energy systems (New York Times, Oct. 5), the number of gelato shops in the United States (New York Times, Sept. 4), the national sales figures for gelato (Dallas Morning News, July 19), and the annual number of boogie-board and surfing accidents (Virginian-Pilot, Aug. 12).

For the purpose of an elegant finish to this piece, I wish that Nexis had revealed me as one of the guilty so I could humbly attack myself. I'm not so lucky. A handful of my Slate colleagues, however, lapsed in that direction. I am as filled with forgiveness for them as I am with relief for myself.

As journalistic ills go, this one is no cancer, but it's often a symptom of journalists who chased a story and didn't catch it.Numbers Are Hard To Come By, Part 2
More about what journalists write when they encounter known unknowns.
By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 24, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET

Numbers Illustration.Everybody cuts corners. Take me, for example. Today I could be writing a critique of the Libyan war coverage. I could be assessing the disaster reporting from Japan or essaying on the difficulties of getting the Syrian uprising story.

But instead of doing anything ambitious or worthy of your time, I'm going to rewrite (I mean update!) a piece I wrote in November, "Numbers Are Hard To Come By."

On the chance that you missed that piece, it's about how news outlets habitually cut corners in their reporting when they can't find solid data that support their theses but still want to run the story. They grab the nearest available—or most frequently repeated figure—and couch it with the phrase "numbers are hard to come by."
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This sort of number-fudging would be praise-worthy if the next sentence out of reporters' word processors was "And because there are no good numbers, we won't bother to generalize on the topic." But I've yet to see a reporter do this, if only because it's too easy to build an audience-pleasing story on soft numbers.

If numbers are so squishy that they require this sort of disclaimer, journalists shouldn't cite them at all. Or, if they insist, the disclaimer should read, "We have no idea what the hell we are talking about." Almost anything would better prepare news consumers for the dollop of dung they're about to be served.

One of the reasons that so many numbers are, as they say, hard to come by is that in so many cases, nobody has the necessary incentive to properly tabulate them. (If this topic makes your bunnies hop, read Max Singer's "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1971; and Peter Reuter's splendid companion piece, "The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1984.)
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I have no confidence that my ridicule will break the bad habits of my colleagues at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't indulge one of my own bad habits of squeezing out easy sequels to previous columns.

So here goes—the recent things in news for which the numbers are hard to come by:

—The number of Japanese elderly living in evacuation centers (believed by some aid workers to be in the majority); Thomson Reuter AlertNet, March 22, 2011

—The number of kidnappings in Mexico ("believed to be in the thousands"), Bakersfield Californian, March 21, 2011

—The number of birds killed by feral cats in Stratford, Ontario (across Canada "untold millions"), Beacon Herald, March 19, 2011

—The number of Christians in Iraq ("as few as 150,000"), Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 16, 2011

—The number of Frenchmen living in London ("up to 400,000"), the Economist, March 24, 2011

—The number of guests caught bringing drugs onto cruise ships (one cruise line says 127 last year out of a million-plus), AOL Travel News, Feb. 17, 2011

—The number of sexual crimes involving teachers and students, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2011

—The number of former homeowners who lost a house to foreclosure or a short sale and have become renters (a "majority"), Contra Costa Times, Feb. 10, 2011

—The number of Down syndrome married couples (one source says it's on the rise), Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 10, 2011

—Number of science fairs (on the local level, one source says, "it's on the decline"), New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011

—Number of microcredit clients ("over 600 million"), Atlantic online, Jan. 28, 2011

—Number of threats against members of Congress ("Many members of Congress feel threats against them have increased in recent times"), Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2011

—Number of video porn companies that have "retrenched or disappeared" (no estimate offered), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 8, 2011

—Numbers of Christians who have left Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine (yes, the copy says "Palestine") in the last 20 years ("hundreds of thousands"), Channel 4 News, U.K., Dec. 21, 2010

—Number of rescissions ("Consumer and industry lawyers said rescissions have risen"), Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2011,

—Number of e-books sold (no number estimated), Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2010

The diplomatic cables liberated by WikiLeaks prove that journalists aren't the only ones dispensing hard-to-come-by fudge. In this cable, the State Department writes that numbers describing Russian arms sales to China and India "are hard to come by." But they're also said to be "growing."

***

Hard To Come By would be a great title for a porn video. Send mildly salacious porn titles based on the news (no hard-core!) to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Just so you know, my Twitter feed is G-rated. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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"Numbers are hard to come by" stories are a subset of bogus trend stories, a pet peeve of Jack Shafer's. Last year, Shafer pummeled the numbers-are-hard-to-come-by genre. In 2006, he documented the ongoing vitality of mythical numbers.