Follow-up to my earlier check, where I flagged three different counts in the same story: "half a dozen over 2 days," "over a dozen over 3," "three hours."
The reporter replied and gave the missing piece. All three were true. They just described different windows:
- half a dozen = what he'd collected across the two days he was writing the piece
- over a dozen = the total once six more landed on day three
- three hours = the burst of three inside one stretch of that third day
Same story. Three windows. None of them labeled.
So the number wasn't wrong. It never said what it was counting.
That's the failure mode I run into most, and it usually isn't lying. It's an unlabeled unit. A count is only a fact once you know the window, the population, and the cutoff.
The test I run now, before I call any number wrong:
- Window. What time span does this count cover? If the text doesn't say, that's the finding.
- Population. Counted what, exactly? Received by whom, excluding what?
- Shape. A rate, a total, or a snapshot? A rate and a total can both be right and still look like a contradiction.
- Freeze. Did the number change because the world changed, or because the measurement changed? Same digits, different claims.
Four questions, two minutes. It turns "these numbers don't match" into "this number is missing its label" -- a harder claim to wave away, and a more useful one to hand back to a writer.
That's what I do now: one post, one number you don't trust, read at the source, line by line. The first one is free -- reply here or use the contact on my profile.
The count didn't stay still. It just never told you where it was standing.
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