Anyone who's worked through Michael Blastland's 'Journalism With Numbers' course on this website or been to one of his many face-to-face sessions with the College of Journalism will get the idea.
Journalists love numbers ... but most haven't the faintest idea how to work with them.
Something similar is true of science and health stories more generally - which, of course, usually involve an element of data, statistics, risk, percentages. And always seem to involve at least one journalist failing to understand how science or research is done or the dangers of jumping to 'obvious' conclusions.
That's why we've been developing, over the past few months, a huge range of content for this website on science reporting - to add to what's here already.
It's a project we've been carrying out in partnership with the Science Journalism Education programme at the Royal Statistical Society.
Until now, the focus here on this site has been on statistics, risks and data. As well as Michael Blastland's course and masterclass, we've produced a range of informal learning events like this Numbers and News seminar.
And, of course, reporting climate change has been another important focus - we have a dedicated glossary as well as videos of the many seminars and masterclasses we've held: like this one on Biodiversity; this one on Climate Change in Africa.
And we've tackled the problem of science for journalists head on in events like this one.
But it's become clear that it isn't lack of knowledge that makes science a problem for journalists.
That old conventional wisdom that journalists don't 'get' science because they're mostly arts and humanities graduates is pure baloney. If an English or history degree doesn't teach you to understand what's put in front of you - language or numbers - then it teaches you nothing.
It wasn't unfamiliarity with immunology or microbiology or epidemiology that made so many journalists scandalously mishandle the MMR controversy.
It was a whole complex of factors and imperatives which at their worst created a bloody-minded, counter-authoritarian ('doctors' must be lying because they represent authority/are in the pay of big pharma/are too conservative to challenge their own views) campaign.
More benignly - innocently, even - many journalists simply didn't understand that their world was almost wholly incompatible with the world of science and research.
What was attractive to journalists about Andrew Wakefield's claim - and it was no more than an assertion - was that it was startling. Extraordinary. A shock.
All the things a good journalist's story has to be. And it was, of course, hugely in the public interest.
If true.
And that was the problem for science. The MMR/autism assertion wasn't even a hypothesis. It was an observation that might, had there not been overwhelming counter-evidence, have opened up a possible angle for further research.
The scientific mind looked at the assertion and thought about carefully constructed, repeatable experiments or testable analysis of the data. The very things, in other words, that are the opposites of startling, extraordinary and shocking.
Where journalism seeks out what's different, what challenges expectations, science seeks what's the same, what confirms expectations or hypotheses.
Where journalism is interested in the rogues and the outliers, science is interested in establishing what's normal, what's the pattern, and is wary of rogue results.
And it's because the worlds of journalism and science are so fundamentally incompatible that so often, in stories around risk, statistics, research and health, journalists lose their bearings.
What does impartiality look like when 999 researchers have concluded X while 1 has concluded Y?
What's the public interest in revealing (or not) an alarming 'scientific' assertion?
Does publication in a peer-reviewed journal guarantee 'truth'?
How do you weigh the testimony of one 'expert' against that of another?
And how do you strip out the self-interest of researchers, keen on headlines to help guarantee funding for their next project, to ensure your reporting is independent?
These are the kind of questions our new courses and reference material here on the CoJo website, as well as a year-long programme of seminars and masterclasses, will address.
We'll be looking at the work of the Science Media Centre - its head, Fiona Fox, happens to be one of the most popular bloggers on the CoJo site - to try to understand the kind of questions that persistently skew science reporting.
We'll also have a video looking at the work of NHS Behind the Headlines - a vital resource for journalists trying to make sense of the mass of health research that's now routinely lands in their laps - not all of it quite as 'straight' as it first looks.
We'll also dissect the way in which one high-profile health story was reported - to try to understand better what ensures accurate, responsible reporting.
We'll be adding new content from leading UK academics on risk, data and statistics. And we'll be digging a bit deeper into the science/journalism divide - there's a taste of this here - with advice and observations from Professor Colin Blakemore, Ben Goldacre, David Spiegelhalter and others.
This content will form the basis of the education programme which the RSS is producing for all journalists - print, broadcast and online. And we hope to make it available on DVD as well as online.
It would be gratifying to think that CoJo's work and that of the RSS will instantly improve the quality of science reporting across the British media.
It's unlikely to do that, of course - I imagine there's little anyone can do to counter those journalists who see no problem in distorting health and science stories to 'prove' their own and their papers' prejudices.
But if we can encourage the rest to think 'hang on a minute' then we'll have got somewhere.
