Use of Statistics in The Media - Assignment Example

Use of Statistics in the Media of the Use of Statistics in the Media Praful Bidwai’s essay that talks of the estrangement of the leftist parties of India from their core support base looks at the loss of farmers as a support group for these parties. For this, he employs a certain piece of statistics that can be used to understand the despair and misery that is a part of the lives that the farmers of many parts of India lead. He remarks that 250,000 farmer suicides have not been enough for the left parties to strongly take up the cause of these underprivileged people.

The force of the statistic is counted upon in his essay, “Challenges for Left” which appeared in the magazine Frontline (September 2012 issue) to create an immediate impact upon the reader so as to make him or her aware of the apathy that Bidwai feels has come to characterize the left parties in recent times (Bidwai 2012). This is obviously put in contrast to a time when this was not the case and such parties were more vigorous in their defense of the downtrodden. The statistic is employed so as to shock the reader into understanding the decline of the moral stature of the party.

The above statistic can be found in the article “‘Freedom from Poverty is Not for Free’: Rural Development and the Microfinance Crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India” by Marcus Taylor. The article appeared in the academic journal, Journal of Agrarian Change and talked of the condition of farmers in many underdeveloped areas of the Indian subcontinent. The study in the journal was undertaken for the purpose of exploring the effect that microfinancing institutions had upon the state of the farmers in the parts of India that the study covered (Taylor 2011).

It collected date from the census that takes place on a periodic basis in India. This kind of a study may be faulty owing to the variables in the samples that are collected. The number of deaths is not changeable and hence would be collected honestly if not for the legal and technical difficulties that a developing country like India faces in recording and recognizing deaths. The article that Bidwai writes however does not focus on the aspect of microfinancing as this is not the aspect that he is interested in as a part of his article.

That contains an argument as to why the left parties in India, which once was interested in the fate of farmers and has now become apathetic. This is an example of how a difference in genre can lead to changes in the focus of the author. Bidwai, himself a noted thinker and writer, looks at a specific site of interrogation in an article that appears in a magazine and leaves out the complex aspects of the issue due to lack of space. My use of the statistic would depend greatly, like in the case of Bidwai, upon the matter of the essay that I would be writing at that point of time.

If the article would be based exclusively on the plight of farmers, I would also find it necessary to include information about the state of microfinancing, an aspect that Taylor talks of. An understanding of the selective nature of the media enables one to look at what is being written with a certain degree of suspicion. It also enables one to understand the political nature of journalistic writing in general.ReferencesBidwai, Praful. 2012. “Challenges for Left”. Frontline, September 8, pp 15.

Taylor, Marcus. 2011. “‘Freedom from Poverty is Not for Free’: Rural Development and the Microfinance Crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India”. Journal of Agrarian Change. 11: 484-504.