Putting aside the "darker" forms of communication whose intentions are to hide, obscure, or mislead, there are manifold good reasons why good intentioned commun

Putting aside the "darker" forms of communication whose intentions are to hide, obscure, or mislead, there are manifold good reasons why good intentioned communicators use quantities (e.g. statistics) differently. One significant underlying reason is that different authors make different value judgments and want to tell different narratives. For a given set of values and narrative, there are many questions to consider, such as: - Should a change be expressed summarized as one scalar? - As a difference? As a division? As a percentage change? (Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_change_and_difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_change_and_difference for many ways to do it; you might be surprised at the number of ways) - Should the initial and final quantities be specifically mentioned? - But what are the appropriate "initial" and "final" quantities? These are tied into the goals (above). Is a relative change best expressed as