Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Media - their reported "Poverty Figures May Be Wrong"
I guess we can't know if this was an honest mistake, or just sloppy journalism.
That said, I'm sure quite a few of us now think 50% of Americans are classified "poor", which is not actually true...
That said, I'm sure quite a few of us now think 50% of Americans are classified "poor", which is not actually true...
Sharon Bernstein recently wrote about it at NBClosangeles.com:
"You may have heard worried news reports that 50 percent of Americans had either fallen into poverty or are considered low income.
But while poverty in the United States is certainly an important issue, those figures appear to be wrong, perhaps based on a misunderstanding of the data by journalists who did not go back to the source to doublecheck their figures, said analysts at the U.S. Census Bureau district office in Los Angeles.
NBCLA worked with three data analysts at the Census Bureau to check the data, and the real figures do indeed appear to be quite different."
