Numbers!!! Who needs them?

When I was a senior in high school, our English teacher, the late Fr. Peter Enderlein, did something one week that showed us how journalism operated in the real world. He ordered the wire service feed from the AP and UPI for a day as well as copies of a number of major newspapers from around the country for that day and the next several days to see how the wire services and the newspapers treated the “hot” stories of the day.

The exercise was quite interesting and informative, because we noticed that some newspapers would cover a story differently than did the wire services;  some would just run with a story from one of the wire services more or less as it came off the wire;  some would edit a long wire service story down to a few paragraphs and give it a new caption; and some newspapers would either bury the story with a short blurb in the back of the relevant section of the newspaper or ignore the story entirely.

What we all found interesting was that oftentimes the caption given to the story changed the slant of the story.  We noticed that the captioning sometimes gave the story a longer title and sometimes shortened the wire service title down to a few words.  There was apparently no rhyme or reason to how this was done.

I was reminded of that today when I came across a story in today’s Houston Chronicle about the life and disappearance of the first African American to force his way through the courts into the law school at the University of Missouri, Lloyd Gaines. Unfortunately, he disappeared one cold, dark night in Chicago in 1939.  Above the title of the story there was a lead in that sixty years after he disappeared, the case has not been resolved.

I’m not a math person, but if I haven’t totally lost my grasp of arithmetic,  then 2009 –  1939  == 70.

Methinks that someone at the Chronicle needs a calculator.

I can say with certainty that the arithmetic error did not originate with the source of the story, The New York Times, because their story, as printed on their web site, does not contain that error. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12gaines.html?_r=1

I can sympathize with the problem because verbally adept people, as a group, are not good with numbers. I am one of those rare exceptions to that general rule.  So I am very sensitive to these kinds of errors and tend to spot them easily.  Whoever missed that has my sympathy.