How to Present "the News"

I just watched a CBS News report where the reporter breathlessly warned the viewers that if the Bush tax cuts were not renewed "the average tax bill for Americans will go up by $3,000". Wow! That will hurt.

But wait a second...

There's an old joke about a bar in Seattle where a bunch of guys are grousing and crying in their beer. Times are hard. Their average wealth is only $100,000 each. But in walks Bill Gates. Now they are all smiles. Suddenly their "average" wealth is just over $1 billion!

Funny thing about averages. If there are some outliers (like a $50 billionaire like Bill Gates), they skew averages. Here's a simple example. The average of these 5 numbers {1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3} is 2. But if you add the number 78 to this list, then the "average" of {1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 78}is 15. That one number skewed the average.

So what about the "average" tax bill going up by $3,000?

Here's the breakdown if you segregate the super-rich from everybody else. This is a post on Robert Reich's blog about Obama's tax cut deal with the Republicans:

It makes a mockery of deficit reduction. Worse, the lion’s share of that $900 billion will go to the very rich. Families with incomes of over $1 million will reap an average of about $70,000, while middle-class families earning $50,000 a year will get an average of around $1,500. In addition, the deal just about eviscerates the estate tax — yanking the exemption up to $5 million per person and a maximum rate of 35 percent.

That $3,000 "average" drops to $1,500 when you remove the millionaires and billionaires from the list.

It is a disservice to a news listener to present the failure of passing the Bush tax cuts as a hit of $3,000 "on average". This isn't what 98% of the population will see. They will see a hit of $1,500 because the millionaires and billionaires skew the result.

When "the news" presents facts in this way -- in a way that seems to purposefully scare ordinary Americans -- you wonder who is writing "the news" and for what purpose. The facts were right, but very misleading. So badly misleading that it appears more as propaganda to rally the bottom 98% to protect the interests of the top 2%.