Numbers: not magic
Posted on Dec 08 2006 | Tagged as: Politics, Work, The Stupid, Media
The front page of today’s Metro: Tesco’s shame.
It’s a story about Tesco selling clothes knocked up in dodgy Bangladeshi sweatshops whose workers are paid pennies a day.
Hang on. Bangladesh? We’re used to hearing that sort of thing about China. I wonder why we don’t hear so much about Chinese sweatshops anymore…
Of course, the story would still have sold newspapers irrespective of how stupid it is. Not that most of the Metro team would have known how stupid it is.
This is where I have a bit of an advantage of most other trainee journalists: mathematical literacy[1], having first studied Astrophysics.
We did a news exercise in school[2] the other week based on an open letter that Lord Howie had written in the New Civil Engineer sometime during Michael Heseltine’s stint as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
Lord Howie’s figures didn’t add up.
I nearly went with “Labour spokesman can’t add” as the story, but it’s hardly news…
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[1] Although my colleague Jen studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, so I might well be screwed anyway.
[2] I hate their website. Ironic for a school who have been trying to drill into us for the last three months how important the web is to have such a rubbish homepage.
