Reporters’ Fuzzy Math (and Outright Lies)

Reporters’ Fuzzy Math (and Outright Lies)
By Jon Ham

I wrote the other day about two reporters for the Politico Web site breaking a rule you should learn in Journalism 101. Now, two other news outlets have made the kind of mistake that, in a normal world, would send a beginning reporter to duty on the nighttime obit desk.

Yesterday, Paul Kane of The Washington Post reported that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had “slashed funding for teen moms.” Kane based his story on a page from Alaska’s budget, which had hand-written line-item changes showing the amount going to Covenant House had been changed from $5 million to $3.9 million.

You can probably tell where this is going. It turns out that $5 million is the highball request for Covenant House and the $3.9 million is what Palin felt the agency deserved. As it happens, the $3.9 million actually represented a three-fold increase over the previous year. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “slash” in the budget.

The Washington Post has not yet corrected this mistake, which resulted in The New York Times running the same mistake today.

As an editor for many years, I can tell you that reporters are notoriously poor at math, but this is getting ridiculous. It’s happened again.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien reported that Palin had cut the budget for special needs children by 62 percent. Was it her intrepid reporting that uncovered that “tip”? No, it was taken from a far-left Web site, which has apparently become the mainstream media’s new source for story ideas.

But did Palin really "cut" the budget, as O’Brien alleges? You guessed it:

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