Journalists Beware: How do You Use Data to Tell a Story?

Photo of Robert Greenstein

Who would you believe? A journalist who has won the 1993 John Hancock Award for Best Business and Financial Columnist or the former Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service at the USDA?

In this case its Robert J. Samuelson who won the 1981 National Magazine Award versus Robert Greenstein, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1996) who received the award for making the Center on Budget and Policies Priorities "a model for a non-partisan research and policy organization." (cited from CBBP website).

On September 5th, DreamActTexas posted "The Media Again: Incorrect and Inflammatory Only in Softer Tones" a commentary on Samuelson's editorial in the Washington Post regarding his belief that immigrants bring more poverty to the U.S. Robert Greenstein is countering Samuelson's assertion.

So who do we believe? Samuelson is a journalist, Greenstein is a respected policy expert. Unfortunately, its people like Samuelson who get more airtime.

After reading todays op-ed by Greenstein (who refutes 90% of what Samuelson has to say) - I wonder where Samuelson got his information? From Lou Dobbs?


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Taking Exception
Misreading the Poverty Data
By Robert Greenstein
Washington Post
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; Page A19


In his Sept. 5 op-ed, " Importing Poverty," Robert J. Samuelson assailed the Census Bureau, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the media for missing what he views as the core of the poverty story. When discussing the figures that the Census Bureau released Aug. 28, we all failed, he said, to explain that poverty "is increasingly a problem associated with immigration," driven by the large numbers of poor Hispanics entering the country.

But a careful look at the data does not support Samuelson's narrow view of how immigrants in general, and Hispanic immigrants in particular, affect poverty trends.

...There is debate on whether immigration lowers the wages of natives -- and the research on that subject is mixed -- but even if it does, the added effect on the poverty rate would be small. Immigrants do experience more poverty than native-born citizens, but they are not driving the nation's poverty rate.

In addition, the overall drop in the poverty rate and the rise in national median income in 2006, compared with 2005, were driven by improvement among Hispanics. Hispanic poverty fell, and the median income of Hispanic households rose. Non-Hispanic whites and African Americans, by contrast, experienced no such improvement.

Indeed, since 2001, Hispanics have made considerably more progress against poverty than the other groups. Their poverty rate is lower than it was in 2000, before the last recession -- it stands at its lowest level on record -- while poverty rates for non-Hispanic whites and blacks remain well above their pre-recession levels.

Samuelson focused on longer-term trends and, in particular, on changes in the number of poor Hispanics since 1990, using Hispanics as a proxy for immigrants. But in doing so, he told only one side of the story.

In the 1990s, the number of poor Hispanics did increase substantially even as the number of non-Hispanic poor declined. So Hispanics accounted for the entire increase in the poverty population in that decade. But that's not true since 2000. The Pew Hispanic Center has found that newly arrived Hispanic immigrant workers were better educated and much less likely to be low-wage earners in 2005 than in 1995.

...Nor was poverty the only issue on which Samuelson's focus was too narrow. He noted, correctly, that Hispanics accounted for 41 percent of the increase, since 2000, in the number of Americans who lack health insurance. That sounds alarming, until you realize that Hispanic population growth accounted for 51 percent of total U.S. population growth over this period.

In fact, Hispanics also accounted for 60 percent of the increase in the number of people with insurance. And the percentage of Hispanics who are uninsured grew more slowly than the percentage of non-Hispanics who lack insurance.

Poverty, race, ethnicity and immigration are complicated and controversial issues, and they arouse strong passions. That's all the more reason that we should be careful how we use data to tell a story. We should not oversimplify a complicated story, as the normally careful Samuelson has done here.

The writer is executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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