Critique of data story published in the media

QUESTION:

“A rewrite of a story published in the media” – enhancing or correcting the data element as appropriate: using what you have learned in this module, look critically at an item in a newspaper or online: identify what data you think is being used in the story – explain how well, or badly, it has been used, and what you would do to improve it.

(Max: 300 words)

My Critique:

The editors played it safe with the title. It’s rather vague and not enticing at all. It sort of leaves the reader to decide what the story is instead of telling the audience what the story is. The essence of journalism is to break the news down into an understandable format as opposed to letting the reader decide what the news is. The title shows some aspects of lazy journalism. Perhaps a more appropriate title like: “Crime in both England and Wales Down Despite Public Perception Remaining Skeptical”. (Data shown through links shared in the article show this).

Using a percentage as a lead helps make the journalist look ‘clever’ but in effect does little to help the reader understand what the story is about. The Guardian chooses to start the story by saying: “Crime in England and Wales has fallen by 8% over the past year according to statistics released today.” What does “8%” really mean? Compared to what? It makes the audience do the math (which is not a good thing). A compact number would have been better e.g “There were 200 less crimes reported in 2011 compared to 2010, according to data released today”.

The article also fails to give context of the numbers. The line graph used in the data link shared on the article shows that perception about crime being a concern is still high even though general crime rate has gone down. But the graph fails to show that only 66 people nationally and 29 people locally were polled. This is a very small number when comparing with a population of 67.1 million people.

The article also fails to publish pie charts and bar graphs to help give the reader more context and fails to humanize the story with a case study.

Link to story being critiqued: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jul/14/crime-statistics-england-wales