How Daily Journalists Use Numbers and Statistics

The Case of Global Average Temperature

Bibliographic Data

ID12909689
AuthorsAnthony Van Witsen (0000-0002-3973-8331, Michigan State University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume14
Issue9
Pages1047-1065
Publication date2019-10-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism Practice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1751-2786 • E-ISSN: 1751-2794
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17512786.2019.1682944
OpenAlexW2982666486
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited66

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

Certainty · Journalism · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Sociology · Statistics · Typology · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Data Visualization and Analytics · Law · Mathematics

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