Why do the media miss important earth shaking news?
I’m thinking about three pieces of news that are very important, yet have not reached the level of public dialog. The first is that the global population explosion ended in the mid 1980’s. I wrote about this in the early 1990’s. The same is true of the Leavitt material about abortion legalization in the 1970’s that resulted in reduced crime rates in the 1990’s. The third is the paper that indicates strong evidence for non-human causes of the current global climate change.
The first two issues have been extensively debated in their respective fields and are now consensus positions. The later is a point in the middle of the debate where consensus is changing. Each of these newsworthy items can be found in one of my blogs: population, abortion and climate.
My hypothesis for the failure of the media is that numbers and statistics are just something that few in the media can understand. Certainly the media editors can’t understand numbers and statistics.
I know that this hypothesis is strong because I made a prediction back in the Spring when the accounting problems of FreddieMac and FannieMae were brought to public attention. I predicted that within two weeks, the NYTimes, the WSJournal or BusinessWeek would publish a summary that explained the accounting issues of these major American financial institutions. It didn’t happen folks.
I don’t think that people who can read numbers and statistics become journalists. Please show me that I’m wrong.