BBC Today presenter Evan Davis gave a closing speech at the Society's 2010 honours and awards ceremony which questioned the spurious use of numbers by the media and said they were often a "rhetorical device" to demonstrate that the topic has been researched.

He said that in his experience, people were often not interested in the numbers themselves and expounded a theme that people were often drawn into an argument about the figures when they were irrelevant to the question. He gave as an example the argument that dominated the first ten days of the general election campaign about whether the Tories could deliver £6bn in cuts and how it would be done. He said the real question was how you could deliver the other £90bn in cuts.

Davis said that the job journalists can do well is piece together the facts: "facts are free, but comment is sacred" and said that good journalism is able to give people a clear picture of what is going on, "A good story is one that makes sense of the data."

What do you think? Watch Evan on video here  and add your comment