Nitpicking the Press: Numbers Count!
Unambiguous: there is zero safe level of lead. Ambiguous: Almost every other number you'll read in the paper.
Get the lead out. But also count correctly.
This morning’s news story: “President Biden Will Remove 1.5 Million Lead Pipes”
Thanks, Joe, but “no thanks” to the culture of journalism, which sometimes strings words together that make no sense. We do not count pipe this way, usually. A line of pipe that runs from a main to a house may be made up of one or more pipes (usually more), if you count the number of tubular objects fixed together to connect everything up. Say they the installers use five pipe segments. Is that five pipes that President Biden will dig up, or is it one pipe all fixed together? The water pipe that feeds Boston, Massachusetts is a complex of pipes that runs about 70 miles, I believe there are two of them in parallel, and although they are not made of lead so President Biden will not be digging them up, I suspect there are tens of thousands of segments joined together to make that work. Or does this count as two?
So who is counting wrong? The EPA, the agency mandating the removal of the pipe? Is it President Biden who, rightfully, gets credits* for this? The press itself? I suspect it is the press office at either the EPA or the White House, since the White House press release says, "The total lead pipe replacement funding announced by the Administration to date will replace up to 1.7 million lead pipes, protecting countless families and children from lead exposure. [Emphasis in original]
Wow. The funding will be digging up the pipe, there will be 1.7 million of them (as usual, the press was down-playing the accomplishment of a Liberal president when they said 1.5 million in the morning news), and the number of individuals who will have lead removed from this part of the water supply is so large they can not be counted, even by a government entity that uses the term “million” 20 times in the same press release.
Is there a lesson here? Of course there is, otherwise I would not have spent so many paragraphs on it. Language involves one entity providing a stream of coded information to others, with the intent of changing the brains stored in the head of the recipients. Some of that information is straight forward. Some of it comes the form of cues that are indirect but intentionally convey a specific meaning (such as dog whistles, or features of tone). A third category of coding consists of clues. Clues, distinct from cues, are not intentional, but passive and unintended bits of information that tell us about the source. For example, “pop” instead of “soda” or “skillet” instead of “frying pan” may narrow down the region of in which a speaker grew up.
When we read reports in newspapers, or missives on issue-based web sites, or any other essay size construct of non-fiction, there are clues that the purveyor of information is just copying the message and doesn’t actually know what it means. (Or, the reader — in this case, me — is clueless.**) With pipe, — and in this sentence the word “pipe” is being used like the word “truck” in the phrase “I drive truck for a living” — one would normally use distance as the measure. Perhaps 1.7 million miles of pipe has to be replaced. Or, one might use installations, so that 1.7 million homes or business are being serviced with pipes that contain lead and must therefore be replaced. One would use the term “pipe” as a countable noun only if you are ordering specific units of pipe from Home Depot, like “Where can I find the 3/4 inch 18 inch Southland Galvanized Steel Pipes Please?”***
This is not a small nit at which I pick. This is a constant and damaging problem. In this case, as far as I can tell, there may be little damage, but in other cases there can be. In my morning paper today there are 28 numbers ranging from hundreds to billions, and in virtually every case the number is left dangling with no context to ascertain its relevance. In once case, there are 800 million dollars of revenue being created by some thing. Is that a lot? If it is part of a nine billion dollar economic system, then no. If is it all of it, then yes. How much is that per business or person involved? There is one case, the case of a costly hack of United Health Care, where a key feature of the ransom paid to undo a cyberattack was, in the minds of the reporters, the percentage it constituted of the overall revenue of UnitedHeatlh Goup. That is some good reporting, kudos to Chris Snowbeck of the Strib. But usually, numbers are left fully uncontextualized, and therefore, often meaningless.
If a number is left out of context — if the meaning of the number requires a context such that without the context the number is a mere bla-bla-bla — then you should assume that the writer is either trying to impress you with the unimpressive, doesn’t understand what the heckity-heck they are talking about, or is just copying from some other entity, such as a press office, that is trying to impress, doesn’t get it, or is, in turn, copying it as well.
That is when you write a Letter to the Editor and complain like a good citizen!
Footnotes
*Or should this be “credit”?
**Different meaning of the word “clue” here.
***As if you can find someone to help you at Home Depot.