Applying Audit Concepts to Media: Why are we more worried about the shifty character on the street than the sugar in our cola?

An interesting thing happened to me earlier in the week. I was looking to get some data on death statistics around the major causes of death.

But I noticed a strange thing: the table from Statistics Canada looked different than it did a few days earlier.

Then I realized it had been just updated.

My first reaction was to sigh as I would have to update my research to reflect the revised work. But then another thing occurred to me: where's the fanfare around this? I didn't recall "hearing" about this, but then again I don't listen to the radio. So I did some quick research around the major newspapers to see if it was front-page news.

The only mention I could find was a Spanish article on the topic published by CBC, which I found through Google News.

What's this got to do with financial auditing?

It has to do with the portability of concepts we have around accounting, particularly those that relate to assessing the reliability of financial information. These concepts are portable to other domains - such as assessing the value of information technology. Richard Hunter and George Westerman note in Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value that one of ways an IT organization can create value is to "improve decision making by improving information quality or timeliness".

This is not limited to the world of business but can also be ported to the societally relevant information. In other words, the collective media system. 

Facebook's Media Misgivings versus the Original Sin of Sensationalism 
As it is widely known now, Facebook has been accused of allowing its service to be used to manipulate the 2016 elections in the US. The topic is much larger but the point is that the issue of decision usefulness of the news spread came to light: how society decides about key issues can be impacted by the spread of "materially misstated" information.

However, the problem is not limited to Facebook. 

Before Trump popularized the term "fake news", Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman put together the book Manufacturing Consent. The latter was a scholarly work, that looked at the issue of media bias in a much broader sense than Trump's characterization of the press. 

But as we know as auditors, the harder objective to test is the one of "completeness". For example, to test whether the company had any undisclosed liabilities at year-end an auditor may test disbursements made after year-end to see if management paid off something that should be recorded in the financials as a liability. 

And that's where we get to the statistics of death and the media's lack of interest in reporting them. 

Media focuses on the sensational stories of "human on human" violence. But do you know how many people died from such causes in 2018? 

According to Statistics Canada, the total number of people that died due to homicide was 373 people - down from 459 the previous year. It is the 25th leading cause of death (22nd in 2017). 

The top killer of Canadian was malignant neoplasms cancer at ~79,000 and heart disease was ~53,000. As Statscan puts it:

"Cancer (malignant neoplasms) and heart diseases remained the first- and second- leading causes of death in 2018, accounting for 46.8 % of all deaths. This was a slight drop from 2017, where these two causes accounted for 48.0% of all deaths..."

But what we are more afraid of:

(A) The shifty-looking character walking behind us at 10 pm at night, or

(B) that sugar infested donut being offered to us at the office?

With respect to the latter (which is why I was looking at these stats in the first place), a big cause of this epidemic is the food that we are being fed. A CBC documentary, “The Secrets of Sugar”, linked sugar to chronic diseases:

“Emerging science is connecting the high consumption of sugar in North American diets with the rapid spread of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.”

The documentary also features Dr. Robert Lustig who blames diabetes and childhood obesity on sugar in the following lecture:

If we add diabetes (per Dr. Lustig) and Alzheimer's (per CBC) to the deaths caused by cancer and heart disease, then we are accounting for more than half of the 283,000 deaths that occurred in 2018 or 51.4%.

No one is saying there are easy answers to get the bottom of these deaths. But how can we get there if don't even know what questions to ask? A media system that gives incomplete information about our society is not providing reliable information to assess what we can do about these life-and-death issues. And so we will probably continue to worry about that shifty character, instead of our sugary diets.

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.