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You're right: Journalists are borderline mathematical illiterates, even those in the business press, who you'd expect to have a little fluency with numbers. I remember a certain business times journalists who liked writing about restaurants. He wrote a story about how wine sales were a huge part of the business. No shit, right? He mentioned the sadly now defunct Rubicon, where I was somewhat of a regular customer and he wrote that wine sales were fully 1/3 of their total, as though that was alot. And it would be, except for they had, at the time, a much talked about $1mil inventory of wine. I called the reporter and told him that he needed to look at his numbers.
The MOST one could possibly spend at Rubicon on dinner was $60-70 for food - foie gras, squab, cheese, dessert,
so assuming that was their average (a generous assumption), their wine sales averaged $30-45/head.
Their average bottle was over $100, so the average guest would have been drinking 2 glasses, max.
If they did 100 diners/night every night, (which they weren't) that would mean, for argument's sake,
$3000/night in wine sales or $18k/week, $80k/month, $1mil/year.
In most retail businesses, you want to sell your inventory every month, BEFORE you have to pay for it.
They were sitting on it for a year, after having paid for it, and the biz times reporter didn't have the wherewithall to ask why.

When I read articles about the budget (local, state, federal), gov't purchasing, taxes, etc. I get the same feeling that the people writing the articles do not bother to multiply or divide enough to put the numbers in human perspective - or they expect their readers to do it (bad assumption). I get the feeling that they just cut and paste the numbers and don't engage in the investigative journalism that might ask the question, "why so much?" This illiteracy extends to discussions of health care, taxes, social programs, war spending, etc. It's as though the numbers are a greek term that they just feel they should pass on.
I'd like to see reporters reduce things to a per/person cost: e.g.
"The DPH's budget of $1.5b, or roughly $1.8k per resident of SF, helps take care of the roughly 10% (80,000) of uninsured residents at a cost of roughly $19k per uninsured per year. Private insurance HMO care thru Kaiser costs roughly $3k/person/year. When asked if the city would be better off if it closed the DPH and paid for Kaiser for the uninsured, Mitch Katz said, "General Hospital is one of the best trauma centers in the country, and even though we can't afford to retrofit it to make it Earthquake Safe, that's exactly why we need to increase funding. We also have contractual obligations to the hard working doctors and nurses who make up the backbone of Social Services."