Numbers Are Hard To Come By

Slate, Nov. 5, 2010 Slate Columns

What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.

In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."

Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknown--news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance--in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."

But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. ..."

Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it--or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"--into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.

(Continued on Slate.)