Good catch. As someone who works with data for a living I know that just about all stats need context to be meaningful. I notice a lot of stats in news given without context as you have noted.
When analyzing data typically the first thing you do is take out the outliers and then focus on the remaining data. News outlets do the opposite, the take the outlier and make it the headline story and ignore the other 99% of the data.
When analyzing data typically the first thing you do is take out the outliers and then focus on the remaining data. News outlets do the opposite, the take the outlier and make it the headline story and ignore the other 99% of the data.