How Daily Journalists Use Numbers and Statistics: The Case of Global Average Temperature

ABSTRACT

Statistics are widely acknowledged as an essential part of journalism. Yet despite repeated investigations showing that routine news coverage involving statistics leaves much to be desired, scholarship has failed to produce an adequate theoretical understanding of how statistics are employed in journalism. This includes such critical decisions as how statistics originate, where to look for useful statistics and which ones to trust. The present research seeks answers through a discourse analysis of a single statistical news development: the joint announcement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on 18 January 2017 concerning record average global temperatures for the previous year, 2016. An analysis of rhetorical expressions intended to convey the absence of doubt (so-called “certainty markers”) revealed that the coverage relied strongly on authoritative scientific sources to determine what counted as good measurement. A specific typology of certainty markers emerged, with five different categories of certainty and four categories of expressions of uncertainty. The certainty and uncertainty markers were not mirror images of each other, with a different structure and different sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Statistics
• journalism
• environment
• average global temperature
• certainty markers
• science policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Some of the data analysis was supported by a grant from Michigan State's Environmental Science and Policy Program Urban Environment Summer Research Fellowship.