Articulating Statistics in Science News in Arab Newspapers: The Cases of Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

The purpose of this study is to understand how journalists engage with and use statistics to articulate science news in particular Arab countries with emphasis on the cases of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The study assesses the current capabilities of journalism and identifies key knowledge gaps in the area, while examining the nature of the news sources that provide this data and how journalists handle these sources in relation to the outputs that they produce. It does so by applying a mix-methods approach that triangulates content analysis, expert panel and semi-structured interviews with journalists and news editors in order to analyse outputs, organisational cultures and practices. The overall project suggests similarities in the existing gaps and causes of these deficits to those present among journalists in the West and highlights some important distinctive contextual features that hinder news reporting of science in the countries studied here.