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Will journalists ever learn the difference between mean and median?

Tuesday, April 21, 2026 5:22

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By Brian Clegg

Averages present a serious problem for many journalists, as few seem to know the difference between a median and a mean – and where each can be useful. You may remember from school that these are both a kind of average. The mean is what you get if you add all the values together and divide by the number of examples. But the median is the mid range value – the typical value.

A classic example of why the median can be provide a better representation of data than the mean is if imagine a room with 30 people in it. Of them, 29 earn between £25,000 and £45,000 – but one of them is Elon Musk. Their mean income is in the billions of pounds, but the median might be, say, £40,000. Which feels more useful as a number?

I bring this up because I’ve just read an article presenting a piece of information much repeated in the media. It’s titled Electric cars cheaper than petrol models for the first time. The claim is ‘The average new electric car now costs £42,620 compared with £43,405 for a new petrol model.’ Sounds great. And if you search online for a comparison, this seems to come up widely. But it didn’t ring true to me. After all, the government’s ‘luxury car’ tax covers anything over £40,000, and the standard Golf GTI, which most would consider a luxury car is under £43,000.

This distortion arises because these are unhelpful mean values, driven by the reality that there are some very expensive cars out there (and probably more ultra-expensive petrol cars are sold than electric). It’s quite difficult to get definitive figures on median prices, but digging around they appear to be somewhere in the range £26,000 to £31,000 for petrol cars, while the median cost of a new electric car is between £36,000 and £38,000 – still considerably higher.

I’m glad electric cars are becoming more affordable – and they genuinely are, although have not come close to comparable ranges with their petrol equivalents in the same class. But this is a confusing mangling of what the numbers tell us, and journalists really should know better.

This has been a Green Heretic production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Image by Michael Marais from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.

Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/04/will-journalists-ever-learn-difference.html

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