Remedial Headline Writing

The headline on a recent article in PC World includes an eye-catching statistic:

IT Pros Find Smut on 3 out of 4 Employee Laptops

My first response was "so few? Really?" (but I'm pretty cynical about things like that). After reading the first paragraph, it became clear that whoever wrote the headline didn't really read the article:

Nearly three-quarters of corporate security and IT professionals in the U.S. have found "inappropriate" pictures, videos or browser cache links on employee laptops, a survey released Wednesday shows.

A more accurate, but less sensational headline would not have confused the proportion of IT staff finding "smut" with the proportion of employee laptops containing "smut". So, it is not that three out of four employees have "smut" on their computers, but that three out of four IT staff members have, at one time or another, found "smut" on other employees' computers. Rather a significant statistical difference, no?

Now the statistic implies that one in four IT professionals aren't doing their jobs properly!