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Seth C
Lv 5
Seth C asked in News & EventsMedia & Journalism · 6 years ago

Is there a term for this journalistic ambiguity?

Often you will hear stories in which injuries are clumped together in such a way as to make serious injuries seem much more common than they are. Here is a made-up, slightly exaggerated example:

47% of students in the South report that they have been violently assaulted, bullied or teased.

Sounds like a very dire situation, but if one looks at the data:

Violent assault - 0.1%

Bullied - 4%

Teased - 43%

So while the numbers are true, they are, at the same time, somewhat misleading. Does this fallacy have a name?

Update:

So far I have not had much of a reply to this...

1 Answer

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