It is similiar to an article I read about Wynn Resorts in October. The article, from Bloomberg, stated that Wynn Profits were down 75% and went on to more or less rail the stock.

In reality, the year prior to that, they had sold a right-to-build in Macau for around $500M. In other words, there was a one-time purchase year earlier and their actual quarterly earnings, year over year, were up about 30%.

Is what Bloomberg said technically true? Sure. But its meaningless misleading sensationalism to state it that way, because the context of the numbers would indicate to any real investor that it was meaningless (when you do a fair value assessment of a security you're supposed to strip out one time earnings and losses and amortize them over a number of years from which they derive, so you'd smooth that out over a 5 year period say rather than calculate your ratios based on it 'as is').

You see a lot of that in the media. The studies themselves are almost meaningless because not many people have access to or bother to read the studies. The net effect is based on how the media reports those studies. That's why I mentioned the facts themselves don't matter because when we see those facts we immediately draw a conclusion based on those facts. And when those facts are presented in such a way to infer an incorrect conclusion, its deceitful and misleading.

Edit:

I'll add that I first noticed this in regards to smoking when I tried to figure out what my odds were of getting lung cancer. Its actually quite the effort to try to figure that out because its hard to find straight answers of what my likelihood is of getting certain afflictions by adding smoking into the mix. Its easy to find things like "You're twice as likely" or "On average it reduces your life expectancy by X number of days" or whatever, but trying to find out what the actual odds are requires a lot of digging. Basically, I've learned that whenever I hear phrases that are relative statistics as opposed to actual odds, that I need to further reality check those numbers and try to find where those numbers came from because the fog of spin is tough to get through. They don't want to say something like you have 1 out of 100 odds or 1 out of 8 smokers get lung cancer, instead they say things like "you're 4x as likely to get it as a non-smoker" because it makes it sound more grave than it actually is.