[gruez]

Seriously? Isn't that an overly cynical worldview? I agree that having distribution information is strictly better than only the median, but in most cases only the median/mean is mentioned for the sake of brevity. People reading a article about writer pay don't want 10 numbers thrown at them for a single statistic.

[lotsofpulp]

It is just my experience over 20 years of reading. A 2x10 or 2x5 table is not going to make an article too long.

But all too often, the word “average” will be used without even clarifying if it is mean or median, and I have seen too many cases where it just so happens to support whatever argument the publisher is making.

See even the example ghaff quoted. The union went out of its way to remove information about the earnings distribution because they did not want people to know how the median was moving.

[gruez]

> A table with 2x10 table with the data is not going to make an article too long

It is if you're going to do it for every statistic. eg. in a story about gen Z skipping college, you could have statistics about tuition rate, student loan amount, time to graduate, graduation rate, earnings after graduation, etc. Add to that, all of the statistics but separated by various demographic factors (eg. geography, age, race), and you can easily have dozens of tables. That's fine if you're writing a 20 page graduate dissertation, but for a daily article on npr.org or whatever that's just overkill.

Not to mention, in many cases the reason why it's being omitted from news stories isn't because of some nefarious motives by the author, it's because the source material only mentions medians. eg. most of the BLS news releases only has medians/averages: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm, so any news stories based off them are inevitably going to not have decile level data like you demand, through no nefarious motivation on the part of the writer.

[lotsofpulp]

> That's fine if you're writing a 20 page graduate dissertation, but for a daily article on npr.org or whatever that's just overkill.

If the publisher is taking on a complicated topic, then it does need all of that information, at least via a link. Otherwise, we have the never ending clickbait of bullshit “articles” with one nebulous average intending to lead people to think something notable has happened, when it really has not.

There is so much propaganda floating around because people accept massaged averages as truth, I cannot imagine it is a benefit to society. Also, in this context, we happen to have wonderful machines and networking that allow us to share data at basically zero marginal cost.

> Not to mention, in many cases the reason why it's being omitted from news stories isn't because of some nefarious motives by the author, it's because the source material only mentions medians.

Yes, it goes without saying that the blame them moves up to the entity that has the data, but chooses not to release it.

[ghaff]

In this case, the distribution (for which it's not clear the numbers are public) is pretty important. A storyline that showrunners of hit shows make bank while the typical scriptwriter sending a spec script in to a studio makes zilch is basically "water is wet." Judging whether writers in film/TV in general have a real gripe with compensation (given that median salaries seem pretty decent) needs some more granularity.