Personally, I'm usually skeptical about pieces that I see in the news that cite statistics or trends, as they almost always present some sort of bias by what they omit. Sports, Finance, and Economic data have used statistics for decades and we know how to interpret those. But increasingly, political, social, and even health-related stories have included more "statistics" and I'm afraid that the numbers and stories usually don't provide enough context or data to answer all of the questions that they raise.

If every such story ended with a link to "download the data cited in this story", I'd have more confidence in what I was reading.