Years ago when I went to college right out of high school my next door neighbor in the dorms had a rather interesting professor for his statistics class.
One week he was watching TV and writing down stuff during the commercials. I ask him what he was working on. He said his statistics professor gave the class an assignment to collect statistical data from the news and commercials and compare the human mortality rate they come up with against the mean life expectancy known to be at around 74 years for a typical human life span.
What they had to do was take the estimated figures from every news story or commercial that stated how many people die from something every minute, hour, day, or whatever. Such as car crashes, smoking, murder, famine, disease, and so on. And assume no one dies while in a car crash, smoking a cigarette while suffering from a fatal disease and being famine stricken plus having a heart attack all at the same time.
Then with those numbers calculate how many people are dieing from each subject in a year and add them up and see how often the world population dies off and gets replaced by those numbers.
He did the numbers and according to the media the world population dies and gets replaced about every 3.5 - 4 years. Not every 74!
SO from that day forth I have never trusted the statistical numbers I see to anything that is on the news or in a commercial.
And to his credit I also do not trust the numbers big business or the government post related to anything they have their hands in either!
I think we all know of a few super corps that said they had billions in profit with great plans to expand when they really meant billions in losses and heading for a bankruptcy auction!