How Arab Journalists Engage and Use Statistics to Report Science: The Case of Statistics in Science News in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt

This study examines journalists’ use of statistical information within science news. The study
focuses on how news reporters use statistics when articulating science news in two broad
areas, that of health and technology news in Arab countries, specifically, of Egypt, Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait. It does so by triangulating content analysis, close reading, expert panel
and triangulating this with semi-structured interviews with journalists. Overall, the study found
that despite a rich Islamic historical tradition of engagement with science in general and maths
in particular in these societies, news reporting of science presents severe deficiencies and
gaps when it comes to engaging and using statistics and numbers to articulate science news.
The results suggest that a lack of professional autonomy influences the use and articulation
of statistical data and attributes this to the constrains that the political system places upon
reporters. Indeed, the data indicates that reporters rely too heavily upon official sources for
accessing statistics and data and experience important restriction when covering these issues.
Equally, it shows that constrains and restrictions often associated with censorship and selfcensorship also hinders their work. However, the study does not attribute to these restrictions
all the gaps and deficiencies and points out instead that many of them can be attributed rather
to the lack of training and skills, which is a similar situation that the coverage of the same news
beat faces in Western countries. Moreover, the study’s results indicate that journalists’ lack of
training and skills regarding statistics and science understanding in general affect their abilities
to provide sound, comprehensive and critical news coverage of science. The thesis suggests
that in Arab societies, science journalism remains overall a deficient professional activity, full
of flaws and gaps -including the lack of graphics and visual data to make this information more
accessible- when reporting these topics. These gaps include the scarcity of specialized
science journalists, general reporters’ lack of knowledge and basic understanding of science
and, the lack of public interest in science news. Given also the role of woman in these countries,
the study also assesses inter-gender issues around the use of statistics in science reporters.
Finally, the study makes recommendations to improve this situation and offers guidance in
relation to where further research might go from here in order to advance this research agenda.