Many readers have written to me recently, given the federal budget crisis, to make a simple request: Please advocate for news stories that put large numbers in context. If The Times does not do that, they say, it is part of the problem, and if it does do so, other news organizations are very likely to follow suit.
George Markell of San Francisco is one of these. He wrote:
I agree that The New York Times should report federal spending items as a percentage of the budget, not just in dollars. I’m a retired copy editor, and I think this would be very helpful to your readers.
Of course, not everybody has been quite so restrained about it. A headline in Nation of Change put it this way: “Tea Party and New York Times Shut Down Government.”
I’m all for anything that makes The Times clearer and more useful to its readers. This is a completely reasonable request with obvious benefits to all.
Toward that end, I just finished speaking with David Leonhardt, someone who is well positioned to do something about this. Not only is he the Washington bureau chief, but he also is a Pulitzer Prize-winning economics writer. (Mr. Leonhardt even majored in applied mathematics in college but, as he notes, that didn’t keep him from making a rather public math error: “I once confused million and billion on the front page of The New York Times.”)
He agrees that there is a problem, and told me that The Times is already working on a solution. A small group of editors is “thinking through a whole set of issues about how we present numbers,” he told me. The results, he said, will probably be determined within a couple of months. They might take the form of new entries to the stylebook, announcements within newsroom departments or e-mails laying out new guidelines to the whole news staff.
“The readers are right,” he told me. “We should do better.”
Part of the problem, he said, is that “the human mind isn’t equipped” to deal with very large numbers. When people see these numbers, he said, they read it as “a lot of money” or “a really big number.”
One answer, as many have suggested, is expressing individual budget figures – consistently – as a percentage of the whole. Another, he said, is in making comparisons. For example, he said, a $10 billion figure might be put in context by comparing it with other costs, like the annual defense and Social Security budgets.
“It begins to help people understand,” Mr. Leonhardt said.
And while he noted that the recent pressure for change is “coming from the left,” specifically the economist-writer Dean Baker and MoveOn.org – which now has more than 18,000 signatures on a petition — this is not a partisan issue.
“Math has neither a conservative nor a liberal bias,” Mr. Leonhardt said.
The Times began grappling with the numbers questions a few months ago, he said, as the time neared for the conversion of The International Herald Tribune to The International New York Times. Many countries report economic data differently than does the United States, and that has to be explained and reconciled, Mr. Leonhardt said.
In the meantime, he said, Washington reporters have already been reminded to add percentages whenever they use large budget numbers, and a new stylebook entry has been written on one of the subtopics, inflation.
It won’t be easy to make these changes happen consistently, especially in stories written on deadline. But, from the reader’s point of view, the effort will be worthwhile – and the sooner, the better.