You’ve probably heard about a tweet by Mekita Rivas last week. She wrote:
Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over. I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for most people. Yet he wasted it on ads and STILL LOST.
Her incredible innumeracy need not be that upsetting. I had never heard of her and probably 95% of Americans have never heard of her.
Here’s the upsetting part: NBC’s Brian Williams and Mara Gay of the New York Times Board of Editors repeated it and in their repeating, showed that they believed it:
“When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear,” Williams said.
The tweet read: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.”
“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” Williams said.
“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” Gay said. “It’s true. It’s disturbing.”
It’s not true. But it is disturbing. And if you don’t believe that Brian Williams believed it, watch and listen to the 45-second video.
Mara Gay tweeted later “Buying a calculator, brb.” (I had to check: “brb” means “be right back.”)
It is true that using a calculator would have helped her correct the mistake. It’s also true that she didn’t need a calculator.
$500 million is 500 times $1 million. You don’t need a calculator to know that. Which means that Bloomberg could have given $1 million each to 500 people. 500 is way, way, way, less than 300 million, the approximate number of Americans living in the United States. (There are approximately 30 million non-U.S. citizens living here.) And you don’t need a calculator to make either of the two observations: (1) seeing that $500 million is 500 times $1 million and (2) seeing that 500 is way less than 300 million.
Why is this so disturbing? Because many people get their news from people like Brian Williams. When various critics of Medicare for All and/or the Green New Deal talk about how those programs, alone or together, will result in increases in government spending of many trillions of dollars over just 10 years, they think that they are communicating something important. I do too. But some of the media people to whom they’re communicating do what I have pointed out is a major error innumerate people make: mistaking one large number with another large number.
Brian Williams could probably have thought this through. But he didn’t. So at best this shows him to be incredibly intellectually lazy.
READER COMMENTS
Ray
Mar 8 2020 at 7:54pm
Intellectually lazy is too kind. “In an ideal world, shouldn’t have graduated high school” is probably more accurate – we have education so that this kind of knowledge of numbers is gut-instinct knowledge – to hear it is to know that it is false.
Ike
Mar 8 2020 at 10:45pm
It’s worse than that, however.
It’s not just Brian and Mara, it’s the producer and the associate producer and the line producer who all saw that segment described, and didn’t question anything.
It’s the Chyron operator (my first job in TV in 1987) who was responsible for any full screen graphics or “lower-thirds” that may have accompanied the segment.
It’s any of the myriad of people involved in budgeting the show and the segments, including the booking producer who ensured we would have an expert in house to talk about the tweet.
And it is anyone involved in that production, even the interns, who had access to the tweet, and could have simply read any of the many replies to see there was an issue of exponential proportions.
For some, it is idiocy. For others, it’s neglect. But it all adds up to institutional negligence and incompetence of the most embarrassing order.
David Henderson
Mar 9 2020 at 7:50pm
Good points about the production process, Ike.
Shane L
Mar 9 2020 at 5:56am
My own university journalism degree was shockingly lacking in any interest in numeracy. (Instead there were many text-heavy sociology-type modules, which were helpful in their own way, but I believe over-represented.)
I often notice news media getting excited by high percentage changes in the trends of some phenomenon that involves consistently low numbers.
In a small country, the number of homicides to women per year might average at 20, but fluctuate more or less at random between 10 and 40 from year to year. News media will sometimes note alarm at an increase of, say, 50%, from 20 in one year to 30 in the next, even though the following year it falls again to 15. There is little appreciation of these random fluctuations. I would recommend generally looking at a longer time period; comparing one year with the next for such very small figures can be unhelpful.
Fred_in_PA
Mar 9 2020 at 10:43am
I’m currently reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Looks like they all went with their System 1’s gut instinct; It was a lot of money. No one engaged their thinking, questioning System 2.
Ray is correct; It is remarkable that our education system had not inoculated them against such. And Ike is correct; It is remarkable that, with so many people involved, none of them had the background to instinctively notice the discrepancy.
There’s another possibility: Perhaps NBC is so hierarchical that the “talent” is allowed to say (or do?) any toad-stupid thing and no one dares correct them. Still, you would think the “talent” would rather be corrected — to appear temporarily mistaken rather than permanently stupid.
Lastly, it’s remarkable that network management doesn’t notice: Since a reputation for slavish conformity — no one ever questions — will discredit them as a reliable news source.
Fred_in_PA
Mar 9 2020 at 11:11am
Actually, it is not unusual for lower level management to suffer such goal displacement; to think their job is to keep the stamping presses running at speed rather than any focus on maintaining & improving the desirability of the product for the consumer. It would appear to be upper-level management who isn’t keeping them focused on “why we’re here.”
Mark Brady
Mar 9 2020 at 11:54am
I just checked Mekita Rivas’s Twitter account, and I am informed that “These Tweets are protected. Only approved followers can see @MekitaRivas’s Tweets.” Sounds like a sensible move.
On Bustle.com I am informed that she “is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She holds undergraduate degrees in journalism and English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her current projects include a collection of short stories and a feature film screenplay.” She writes on fashions and celebrities like Meghan Markle. You can read more about her here. https://www.bustle.com/p/i-thought-working-nonstop-would-make-me-a-success-instead-i-got-dangerously-burnt-out-17007826
Pete Smoot
Mar 9 2020 at 12:49pm
I get that people have trouble with orders of magnitude. I find it disturbing that Senator Sanders lumps millionaires and billionaires in the same phrase. The one has 1,000 times as much money as the other, fer cryin’ out loud.
(That’s the difference between me mowing lawns in high school and me after graduating college and working as a software engineer for 10 years. Just saying.)
Even with that, shouldn’t even the least mathy person hear “500 million dollars” and “300 million people” and realize those numbers are sorta close to each other? They’re a small integer times 100,000,000. One divided by the other is going to be close to 1, not 1 million.
To be fair, I do math in my head all day, every day. It’s automatic. I don’t host a talk show and if I did, I’m sure I’d have so much on my mind I wouldn’t be doing arithmetic. They’re thinking about the script, posture, timing, the next guest, what the producer is whispering in their earpiece, a lot of other things. That they can form coherent sentences is amazing.
David Henderson
Mar 9 2020 at 7:52pm
You wrote:
Exactly. And well said. But your next point is relevant too. It’s automatic for you.
That’s why I think my version is even easier. 500 million is 500 millions. So that’s one million for each of 500 people.
Bobson
Mar 9 2020 at 12:53pm
I think this is really the wrong framing for the problem with both the original tweet and the repeats. It’s not that there’s a math error, even if the math is simple. I make boneheaded math errors all the time double-checking my daughter’s elementary school homework. That’s just being human.
The problem is that they saw that the math came out as “One man, Mike Bloomberg, could make everyone in the US literal millionaires tomorrow if he wanted to” and that didn’t seem implausible enough to stop and check if maybe the math came out wrong. They did the same thing a while back when they decided that Bezos could spend some small fraction of his fortune and solve world hunger, and he just didn’t because, he enjoys the thought of people starving to death, I guess. They’re never really clear on that last part.
And that’s the scary thing about the left right now. As awful as Trump is (and I mean, he’s really, really awful), a non-trival chunk of Sander’s support (has anyone done any polling on this? it really seems like something we should get a handle on the size of) honestly believes that if he’s elected president, he’s going to grab all the rich people’s money and use it give everyone in the US shelter and enough food to eat and first-class health care and no one will ever need to work again if they don’t want to. Because they think that’s how the world would work if the right people had all the money.
MB
Mar 10 2020 at 1:11pm
Coming from a science background and seeing how reporters cover subjects I have worked on, this does not surprise me. One thing you should know, I have a few reporter friends, two of them SPECIFICALLY chose journalism as a major because it had no math requirements. I would doubt Brian Williams could have thought it out.
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