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Phillip Blanchard	Post subject: Let's not be hasty Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2003 12:13 am
Joined: Sun Apr 07, 2002 1:01 am Posts: 8342 Location: Bethesda, Md.	The average soldier in a combat unit in Vietnam was 19 or 20 years old and unmarried, Mr. Kolb said. Of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, 61 percent were 21 or younger; of the enlisted men killed, only about 25 percent were married. By contrast, the average age of the 28 men killed in the war with Iraq so far is 26, and 8 of the 22 enlisted men who died, or 36 percent, were married. (New York Times)<p>***Let's just say it's a little early for such a statistical comparison.***
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rumymommy	Post subject: Re: Let's not be hasty Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2003 12:47 am
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2002 12:01 am Posts: 138	"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."<p>Numbers are one of those things few editors seem to pay attention to when considering the worth of a story. Your example is excellent. Here's a somewhat word example of my own:<p>Yesterday, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a story spiked by citing the math that was absent:<p>Basically, it said nationwide, from 1999 through 2001, 180 children younger than 2 died in adult beds. Of those, 58 were ruled to be overlays, or an adult rolling over on them and suffocating them. This was the "disease of the week" in this particular story. In South Carolina in 2001, there were 11 infants who died of overlays. The story didn't mention that nationally there were more than 12 million births during those three years, and that in South Carolina there were more than 55,000 births in 2001.<p>When I mentioned that during the cited times .000005 percent of U.S. children and .0002 percent of S.C. infants died from what the story says is a common practice of laying in bed or on a couch with a child, the editor said "But 11 children died." I was unable to convince him that the story blew the "danger" out of proportion and should be spiked. The best I could do was to add in the birth figures to give our readers some context. Oddly, the story didn't get into why South Carolina appears to have a higher number of overlays.
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