Whenever I see single number statistics thrown around in news articles, press releases, ads, etc., I'm generally pretty skeptical. I want to see the distributio

Whenever I see single number statistics thrown around in news articles, press releases, ads, etc., I'm generally pretty skeptical. I want to see the distribution. Is it Gaussian? Bimodal? Flat? Apparently random? The shape of the data tells you a lot that isn't captured in a single number like a mean or median. Also, what's the sample size? What was the methodology used to acquire the data? Lots of statistics fall apart when you look at how the data was collected.