Undergraduate mathematics programs must prepare teachers for the challenges of teaching statistical thinking as advocated in standards documents and statistics education literature. This study investigates the statistical thinking of pre-service secondary mathematics teachers at the end of their undergraduate educations. Although all had completed a required upper-division two-course sequence in probability and statistics, most were challenged by two tasks which required a critical analysis of the use of statistics in newspaper articles. Some patterns emerged in the incorrect answers, including a tendency to focus on potential sampling issues which were not relevant to the tasks. The results have implications for, and reaffirm concerns about, the undergraduate statistics preparation of secondary teachers in the United States.