The Media and Numbers: "It's Complicated".

According to everyone in the British media, 25% of young men are worried about the amount of porn they watch online and men watch an average of 2 hours per week.


Says who? The BBC apparently "teamed up with doctors from the Portman Clinic", a London specialist mental health hospital, to do the study. The actual survey was done online by a certain market research company, which I am not going to name, because they've already got free advertising in every newspaper.

What does this tell us about pornography? Nothing. Dr Petra Boynton explains why in a long and excellent deconstruction. In order to properly interpret these results, we'd need to know lots of details about the study design, which we weren't told. Of course this doesn't stop us from going ahead and interpreting them improperly. 25%! 2 hours. Ooh, that's a lot. Is it? This online porn, eh. Tut tut.

So, sure, 25% could be The True Proportion Of Men Who Worry About Online Porn. Or it might not be. Or the whole question might be so fraught as to be meaningless. The point is, we don't know, we cannot possibly know from the limited amount of information we were given, and we weren't meant to know, because numbers like these are essentially pornographic themselves - they're just for show.

Numbers very rarely make a good news story. When you look into it, the vast majority of them only make sense to people who know all of the background, and by definition, if you have to spend a few pages explaining the background, it's not a good news story. A good news story is one which anyone who can read can immediately understand, and get angry/scared/amused by.

Yet journalists also love numbers because everyone knows, on some level, that numbers matter. The very fact that a story has numbers in it, makes that story better. Indeed, very often, there would be no story without them. Someone doing a survey and finding some numbers can make a news story out of nothing. "Modern online pornography worries some people and is a complicated issue" isn't news; "25% of men..." is news.

So what we end up with is lots of news stories which have numbers in them, but which don't, actually, tell us anything about the world, which is what numbers are supposed to do. Numbers to most of the media are like an attractive trophy wife. They like to be seen with them in public. But deep down they're not all that attached.