The content in this guide was modeled after a guide that was originally created by Research & Learning Services, Olin Library, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY, USA and has been adapted for the NWP Learning Commons in September 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY NC SA 4.0 International License.
Becoming an astute user of news content in the media means learning to understand the proper use of data and statistics in the news.
Watch this TED Talk about how to spot bad or incorrect uses of statistics. This will help you to critically read news sources that use statistics pulled from other articles or studies:
Chalabi, M. (2017, February). 3 ways to spot a bad statistic [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/mona_chalabi_3_ways_to_spot_a_bad_statistic?language=en
Read this brief article, written for journalists, to increase your general media literacy. Learn to spot the misuse of numbers in news sources:
Kayser-Brill, N. (2012). Become data literate in 3 simple steps. In J. Gray, L. Bounegru, & L. Chambers (Eds.), The Data Journalism Handbook. European Journalism Centre. https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/datajournalismcom/handbooks/The-Data-Journalism-Handbook-1.pdf