Fractions

As of the time of this post, I’ve been out of television for 1390 days. Haven’t really missed it much. But it’s high time I start sharing some of my experiences. I will, under the banner:

One of my pet peeves was the general lack of math skills in a newsroom. That goes for anything involving statistics or finance. I used to joke that “Two out of every three television news anchors can’t handle simple fractions… that’s almost half.”

Well, here’s what my wife overheard yesterday morning (names and stations being withheld to protect the innumerate):

“A new study shows that 20 percent of all homeless people are veterans. That’s one out of every four.”

Forget the Writers’ strike. You just can’t make this stuff up.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, broadcasting, mathematics[/tags]