Journalism’s greatest sin might be the failure to provide an understandable context for stories.
One example: Too many reporters fail to use the denominator when describing simple statistics. As two researchers note in a recent academic journal, good analysis is “always about numerators and denominators (N/D).”
As any fifth-grader should know, the fraction’s numerator (the top number) tells us the number of parts of the whole. The denominator (the bottom number) tells us the total number in the whole. If 15 students fail an exam, it means something completely different if we’re talking about a class of 30 students (15/30) as opposed to a school of 400 (30/400).
A recent Hartford Courant report describes a protest against “huge school system cuts” in Hartford:
Emotions ran high as about 30 organizers gathered at city hall on Tuesday to demand the city restore $31.5 million in proposed cuts for Hartford’s public schools, which would avoid the 387 anticipated layoffs of paraeducators, custodians, social workers, resource teachers, counselors, and other school employees.
So: $31.5 million out of what? Is $31.5 million really a Draconian cut? One searches this article, in vain, for the denominator. We can start to calculate that amount:
In the 2025 budget, HPS is set to receive $224 million from the state under the ECS, more than half of all revenue. The district receives around $27 million in federal funds and an additional $74 million in other state grants. The city contributes $96 million to the district.
So does that mean the total budget is $421 million (224+27+74+96)? If so, the cuts represent 7.4 percent of the budget ($31.5 million/$421 million).
Not so fast. According to Connecticut Insider: “The Hartford City Council unanimously passed a $623.8 million budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year Tuesday with few alterations from the mayor’s original proposal.” If this report is correct, then the cuts amount to 5 percent of the budget ($31.5 million/$623.8 million).
Oh, and is this the operating budget or does it also include capital expenses?
Either way, we have no way of making sense of Hartford’s school budget problems.
Later, the article calls the cuts “the worst cuts for the district in at least 20 years.” That’s not a quote from an expert or advocate; that’s the reporter talking. I’m skeptical. Might we find a comparison? Also, what does “worst” mean? Suppose the cuts clear out deadwood and make the system work better. Is that bad? We simply have no way of knowing.
Another missing denominator concerns the protesters. Thirty people protested the cuts. How can we make sense of that number? The Hartford schools enroll about 16,500 pre-K to 12 students. Is that the correct denominator? How many people does a protest need to get media attention?
All we can say for sure is that 30 is enough for the Courant. This story ran under a banner headline at the top of page 1 of the May 23 edition.
(P.S.: You might wonder how I can say that “too many reporters fail to use the denominator.” Good point. I can offer data for neither numerators nor denominators. But one is too many. And I see this problem almost daily.)
Addendum
Donald Trump’s argument that he won the 2020 election relies on his ignoring the denominator.
Trump has repeatedly said that “we got more votes the second time [in 2020, against Joe Biden], by millions, than we got the first [in 2016, against Hillary Clinton]” (quote from a rally in Coachella, California).
If only Trump’s numbers counted, yeah, he did better in 2020 than in 2016. He got 62,984,828 votes in 2016 and 74,223,975 in 2020.
But the denominator (the total number of votes) also grew substantially. The total number of voters increased from 138.8 million in 2016 to 158.4 million in 2020. Trump’s Democratic opponents beat him, in raw numbers, in both elections. Their numbers rose substantially, from Clinton’s 65.8 million votes in 2016 to Biden’s 81.3 million votes in 2020. Their percentages also increased from 48.2 to 51.3–both better than Trump’s percentages of 46.1 and 46.8.
The Missing Denominator strikes again!
