> it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.

Isn’t that a clear case of disinformation?

We're talking about metrics with objective definitions that are taught in schools around the country, not headlines like "The President is cancelling his trip to Africa because he hates black people". I don't know, seems like a huge difference to me...

No. If the media reports that the average salary is $50k/year that is not disinformation even if a lot of people will misinterpret it as meaning "most people make $50k/year" simply because they don't understand that an average is a measure of central tendency, not distribution.

Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.

If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.

The public being too ignorant to interpret analysis isn't disinformation.

I wish everyone thought this way :/

So it's ok to mislead people so long as you are not lying directly?

It's ok to pass on accurate information that requires the public to put in the work to accurately understand it.

It is probably impossible to have the complex dialogue sufficient to inform people both intelligent and willing to put in the work in a way that is not apt to either be misunderstood accidentally or more frequently on purpose.