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That bothers me on basically every stat on a news article. They just come up with a number and expect people to believe it. But they don't talk about how it was calculated so people can't confirm it themselves, and very often, if multiple "experts" are the ones calculating the stats, they just pick the biggest outlier to strum up more controversy.

I think articles like this usually do mention the stats a bit, but usually start out with an extreme story to hook the reader. It's a common storytelling technique and something I see often in journalism and pop-sci books.

It's not just incomes, it seems like news articles almost always use averages no matter how inappropriate they are. I've complained about this at some length: https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#the-cult-of-averages