Facts and numbers be damned - they can't get in the way of an hysterical claim

From America Is Not the Fifth Most Dangerous Country for Journalists, You Idiots by Alex Griswold.

Yet another in the continuing flood of entries illustrating journalistic innumeracy and incapacity to reason critically.

Addressing the claim that America is a dangerous place for journalists, Griswold appropriately excoriates the excitable ninnies for their foolishness.

These stories are based on a report put out by Reporters Without Borders, a group that does a lot of good calling attention to threats to journalism worldwide. Unlike the violence against women report, it actually relies on things like numbers and data. So there's that.

What the report actually found was, yes, the U.S. had the fifth-most journalists killed in the line of duty in 2018, tied with India and behind Afghanistan, Syria, Mexico, and Yemen. But it's mathematically illiterate to take that datapoint and claiming it proves more abstractly America is the fifth "most dangerous country for journalists," behind countries such as Russia and North Korea.

First, it makes little sense to use the raw number of deaths in country-by-country comparisons, rather than the rate of journalists killed. The U.S is the third-most-populous country in the world. Even if the rate of journalist deaths remained consistent across all countries, the U.S. would rank in the top five of total deaths. It might sound bad to hear the U.S. had six times as many journalists killed this year as Slovakia, but when the U.S. has around sixty times the population, Slovakia is actually ten times more dangerous.

Second (and I don't want to come across as glib here, because even one death is a tragedy), the grand total of journalists killed in the U.S. this year was six. The global total was sixty-three. The death of a journalist is a very, very rare event, rare enough that even a small number of unlikely incidents is enough to catapult a nation into the ranks of the "most dangerous."

Of course, that's exactly what happened. On June 28th, a deranged man with a vendetta against local Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette walked in and killed four employees in the single worst attack on journalists in modern U.S. history. The other two deaths were journalists covering Tropical Storm Alberto in North Carolina, killed when a tree fell on the highway. Both tragedies, but clearly outliers rather than barometers for the level of danger faced daily by American journalists.

Here we hit upon the third point; the number of journalists "killed" was compiled regardless of the manner of their death or the perpetrators. When it comes to calculating threats to journalism, no one would say that a freak accident like a tree falling should be treated like an ISIS execution, or that a local crazy is like a Saudi prince. But that's the result if you use the raw number of deaths as a stand-in for "danger."

Lastly, murder is only one form of state-imposed "danger" faced by journalists. The Reporters Without Borders report also tracked the number of journalists imprisoned, taken hostage, or "disappeared" on the job. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. appears on none of those lists. By using only verified deaths as a metric for "danger," countries like Turkey, China, Iran, and Egypt get a pass because they prefer to merely imprison and torture journalists.