Thread by @baekdal

One thing that makes me absolutely furious is when a news site takes accurate data and then misrepresents it into something that is inaccurate.

To me, this is the biggest crime a newspaper can make. You took truth and turn it into false.

An example is this article, where OMG OMG OMG... things are really bad:

(text translated via Google Translate)

So... let's look at numbers.

As you can see here, traffic fatalities have dropped quite a lot over the past 20 years, and then it has more or less leveled out.

But, wait a minute, the journalist says, look at how much it has gone up from 2018 to 2019. That's almost 20% !!!

Yes, this is the normal level of fluctuations that we see in the data from year to year. It also happened in 2016 and 2013.

In other words, it's nothing!

I agree that, if this year (2020) that the number of fatalities keeps going up, then yes, we might have a problem. But right now, there is nothing here to see.

You have no story!

I have said this many times before. I love journalism, but this is the type of journalism that makes people think the world is getting worse.

It's just outrage journalism.

There is no story to tell here. The numbers haven't changed in a trend-like way. And yet, this is now being reported as "OMG OMG OMG ... you should be 'shocked' by this".

This is not journalism, and there is nothing journalistic about it.

I love journalism. I hate this!

What makes me even more furious is that, when you then read the article, almost at the very end, the journalist added this:

So they know that their headline and start of the article is a lie.

So, they chose to directly mislead and shock their readers for ... clickbait.

I mean... for f... sake people!

How are we ever going to fix the problem around trust in news if you continue to do this day after day?!?!?

And now the other Danish newspapers are jumping in on the story, telling the same 'OMG OMG' story ... because 'outrage'.

At the same time, they apparently don't understand how averages are calculated. They write:

"At the same time, it is a 12 percent increase over the years 2014-2018, with an average of 183 deaths per year.

Let's actually calculate the average... These are the numbers:

2014-2018: 183.3
2015-2019: 188.3

That's an increase of 2.5% ... not 12%

I mean, math people!

But averages can tell you anything. If I just change the scale a bit, I get these averages. Now the number is suddenly down by 9%.

Seriously journalists. Stop this!

What you actually do as a journalist is that you calculate the trend line over a 'moving average'. And when you do that, you end up with this.

As you can see, there is no actual change in the trend. You are creating outrage without having a story.

@threadreaderapp unroll please

@threadreaderapp ...and now another newspaper joins in, telling people that it's the highest number in five years. As you can clearly see i the graph above, not only is this misleading, it's also not true. It was higher in 2016.

This newspaper also repeats the misleading 'average' calculating.

I mean, what do we do about this? This is a culture problem across the journalistic profession. How do we change this?

And mind you, the examples here are all from national newspapers. These are not tabloids.

This story is getting more and more intriguing and complicated (and even more frustrating). It turns out that there are other interests at play here, linking to lobbyism and political legislation. I will write up an article about it ...

But it turns out that all the statements here are directly copied from a press release published by the government, who are trying to introduce tougher traffic legislation. So they are using this misleading data to get public support... and we are helping them in the press.

Anyway, article coming.