I was just watching CNN, the anchor (I think it was Brianna Keilar) interviewing Erin Hawley who is “Of Counsel” for the ironically named “Alliance Defending Freedom.” The discussion was about the case State of Louisiana v US Food and Drug Administration, in which the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is currently hearing arguments. (The case is an attempt to restrict access to mifepristone by mail.)

What caught my ear, and kept me watching to the end of the interview, was that during the few minutes I watched, Hawley said—three times—that the drug sends “one in point five women to the emergency room.” She also harped on the drug’s “black box” nature, and compared sending it through the mail to sending cocaine. But that “one in point five women…” bit, that’s what made me yell not at the guest, but at the interviewer. I yearn for the days when reporters paid attention to what interviewees were saying and called them on it. “One in point five”? What does that even mean? Why didn’t Keilar call her on that non-statistic to ask Hawley what the hell she really meant?

Digging through this group’s web site, I think the statistic Hawley was trying to quote was that “roughly one in 25 women who take mifepristone as directed will end up in the emergency room.” And she was probably conflating it with another biased group’s study quoted on the ADF web site that analyzed 866,000 prescriptions and found nearly 11 percent of women suffered serious complications, “which is approximately 22 times higher than the less than 0.5 percent figure the FDA cites.”

Statistics don’t lie, but the uses one puts them to—especially when misquoting them—mean that we’re not getting the whole story. In this case, the story probably would not have changed had the anchor called out the guest for spouting nonsense, but when people are presenting themselves (or being presented) as experts, they really ought to be able to communicate the truth correctly.

And for a news program to let such miscommunication go by, forcing me to dig through the guest’s web site to figure out what she was saying, makes the news program much less useful to me (which is bad) and the guest far less credible (which in this case, is fine with me. She represents a group which has morals [okay, that’s acceptable] and is trying to force those morals on others [which is completely out of line]).