Telling stories

In his Guardian column on Saturday, Ben Goldacre reminds readers how easy it is to manipulate statistics to make a point.

In coverage of the recent protests over government spending cuts, a number of media outlets managed to conflate the fact that there was some violence with the fact that 149 people were arrested, running with headlines like “Cuts protest violence: 149 people charged”.

In fact, only a dozen of those 149 arrests were for violent offences – the rest were people who took part in the non-violent protest at Fortnum & Mason (and whose arrest has been highly controversial).

Furthermore, all this needs to be seen in the context of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part peacefully in the march.

This sort of misrepresentation of numbers often hides a political agenda, but sometimes all it takes is a journalist looking for a story.

Researchers are encouraged to tell good stories, too, and should be cautious of building them on facts that look like they support them, but actually don’t.