This one:
The Goldilocks zone is real enough, but the Goldilocks number ...?
The term “Goldilocks zone” sometimes references Earth’s position, as just right for carbon-based life. The number, as it happens, is a phantom, but a powerful force in shaping opinion nonetheless.
Marvelous fun from Brooke Gladstone at Slate (May 19, 2011) about the Goldilocks number, 50,000, used in media to gin up scare stories. Here's an interesting item by the same writer on “objectivity” in journalism.
Now, as I have said for years, there isn’t really any such thing as objectivity in journalism.
One’s bias isn’t a bad thing in principle, it is simply the place one stands when covering a story. One can make allowances for it, to the extent that one recognizes it.
Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista
And this one:
Numbers don’t lie, but people do
Or anyway, they babble political correctness and call it accuracy. We looked at the “Goldilocks number” used to manipulate public opinion. In “The Marginalization of Christians continues in Canada” (May 21, 2011), journalist and author Michael Coren talks about politically correct manipulation of crowd numbers. For example, the government broadcaster, tax-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation underestimates the crowd for pro-life rallies by multiples; in the case Coren mentions, CBC underestimated by 200%. But it overestimated the Gay Pride parade in Toronto by five times the police figure:
We can only thank our publicly funded stars that the same network — joined by most others in the mainstream media — tells us every year that more than a million people attend the gay pride parade in Toronto, when the police privately inform journalists that 200,000 is closer to the mark. For a million people to be present, the crowd would have to stretch from the southern tip of Toronto to Barrie, Ont., more than 100 km north.
(See especially, Coren’s Why Catholics Are Right (McClelland & Stewart), on the bestseller list for five weeks.)
