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By Bobbi Bowman Starbucks is proliferating in upper income neighborhoods in cities and suburbs. McDonald's is advertising premium coffee. Raise your hand if you think Americans are drinking more coffee now than ever before.
Sorry but you're wrong. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which among other things, tracks what Americans eat and drink, reports that while the U.S. population has ballooned, per capita consumption of coffee has been shrinking for the last three decades. In 1946, Americans drank 46 gallons of coffee each. In 2005, that number was 24 gallons, about half. What does this have to do with journalism? Context. Context is all-important to accuracy. As Jesse Jackson once said, "Text without context is pretext." Numbers only have meaning if you compare them to something. Each American drinks 24 gallons of coffee a year and that sounds like a lot—until you realize that each American also drinks more than 50 gallons of sodas. What's the big deal? Coffee drinking grew throughout the first half of the 20th century. During World War II, weary GI's yearned for a hot cup of jo'. Then the soldiers came home, got married, and moved to the suburbs to raise the Baby Boomer generation, also known as the Pepsi and Coke generation. In 1947, Americans gulped down 10.8 gallons of carbonated soft drinks per capita. Thanks to smart marketing and an exploding population of kids, soft drinks peaked in 2000 at 53.2 gallons per capita. It's fallen to 51.5 gallons per capita in 2005. The new kid on the drinking block is bottled water. Americans swigged 2.7 gallons of bottled water in 1980, 16.7 gallons in 2000 and a whopping 23.2 gallons in 2004. Let's move from coffee to putting an important political issue in context. 7.6 million. The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that as the number of Hispanic citizens who reported voting in the 2004 presidential election. That voting percentage of 47 percent of Hispanics, who are U.S. citizens, was not much different statistically from four years earlier. Wow! The context that your readers need: Those 7.6 million Hispanics were only about 4 percent of the 197 million U.S. citizens who voted in the 2004 presidential election, according to the U.S. Census. Make that only a little wow. "The most common mistake is probably the use of big numbers — millions, billions and the like — without any context," said David Leonhardt, an economics columnist at The New York Times, who has given seminars on the media's use and misuse of statistics. "To say that a federal program costs $5 billion doesn't actually make it clear whether it's a big program or not. Over how many years will that $5 billion be spent? What portion of the budget is it? How does it compare to other programs?" "If you get the statistics wrong," he said, "you get the story wrong, too." More context. The Census Bureau in its back to school facts reported: 18 million. The projected number of students enrolled in the nation's colleges and universities this fall. This is up from 12.8 million 20 years ago. The context: Only 27 percent of the U.S. Population holds a college degree. A college graduate is in an elite group in the U.S. Lack of context even pops up when journalists gather. Elizabeth Atkins, a former Detroit News reporter who now writes about the challenges faced by multi-race people, spoke to a workshop at last month's NABJ convention. There were about 6 million mixed race people in the U.S., she said. The context: They represent less than 2 percent of the population. |