Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism

Alessandro Martinisi, Jairo Alfonso Lugo-Ocando

Description

Challenges common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics for quality news and improves our understanding about the usage of data and statistics

This book looks at how numbers and statistics have been used to underpin quality in news reporting. In doing so, the aim is to challenge some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. It seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.

List of Illustrations; Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Numbers as information in the Information Society; Chapter 3: The never-ending debate on quality in journalism; Chapter 4: Statistics in journalism practice and principle; Chapter 5: The normative importance of ‘quality’ in Journalism; Chapter 6: Journalism meets statistics in real life; Chapter 7: The ideology of Statistics in the News; Epilogue; References; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social sciences
• Statistics
• Media studies

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 29 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785275357
• Langue: English

Extrait

Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism
Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism
A Study in Quantitative Reporting
Alessandro Martinisi
Jairo Lugo-Ocando
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Alessandro Martinisi and Jairo Lugo-Ocando 2020
The authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946150
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-533-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-533-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
To our beloved parents, always source of inspiration and love
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
1. Introduction
What this book is about
Our rationale
Definitions of main terms
Modernity and cybernetics as projects
Overview of the book
2. Numbers as Information in the Information Society
Enlightenment, society and information
Reporting numbers as information
Political arithmetic and public sphere
Numbers and public sphere
Quality in a quantified world
Quality as a precision tool
3. The Never-Ending Debate on Quality in Journalism
Ambiguity and convergence
The problem of measuring
Manifold dimensions of quality
Pursuing objectivity and quality
Scientific methods in journalism
4. Statistics in Journalism Practice and Principle
Ars conjectandi in journalistic performance
Statistical agencies as information providers
Statistics as rhetorical device
5. The Normative Importance of ‘Quality’ in Journalism
Information framework
Philosophical framework
Information links
Abstraction levels
The irrelevance of truth
6. Journalism Meets Statistics in Real Life
Content analysis
The problematic sense-making
Why do they do it?
Focus groups and audiences
Authority, accessibility, accuracy
Q-sort analysis
Further discussion
7. The Ideology of Statistics in the News
What is there
Broader discussion
Scope for further research
Epilogue
References
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
3.1 The process of producing quality news
3.2 Measurable elements of the process of producing quality journalism
3.3 Features of objectivity
3.4 First-level subdivision of objectivity
3.5 Theoretical map (Westherstal, 1983)
6.1 Sample of newspapers analysed and subdivided by title
6.2 Cross-tabulation of newspapers with the human-interest variable
6.3 Cross-tabulation of topic with the human-interest variable
6.4 Cross-tabulation of the human interest with the category variable
6.5 Cross-tabulation of the variable *humans and *genre by percentage
6.6 Percentage of *verification variable
6.7 Cross-tabulation between the *journogender and *verification variables
6.8 Cross-tabulation of the two variables of *timeliness1 and *paper
6.9 Percentage of the variable *statsclaim
6.10 Cross-tabulation of the variables *topic and *typestats
6.11 Cross-tabulation of the two variables *source3 and *paper
6.12 Cross-tabulation of *source3 and *topic by percentage
6.13 Biplot (exploratory graph) obtained from variables *paper and *source2
6.14 The pentagonal approach to the concept of quality
6.15 The ‘quality ecosystem’ with four levels of stratification
Tables
3.1 Dimensions of quality according to D. Garvin (1988)
3.2 Dimensions of quality according to R. Russell and B. Taylor (2005)
3.3 Comparison between IQ category and IQ dimensions
5.1 Attributes of information quality
5.2 Examples of definition for ‘disinformation’
6.1 Newspapers divided by topic
6.2 Cross-tabulation of paper with topic
6.3 Cross-tabulation of the variables *paper and *humans
6.4 Length of the articles analysed divided by length
6.5 Cross-tabulation of the variables *topic and *criticality2
6.6 Cross-tabulation of the variables *source1 and *evaluation2
6.7 Cross-tabulation of the variables *topic and *timeliness1
6.8 Cross-tabulation of the variables *paper with *source2
6.9 Q-sort details
6.10 Summary of the Q-sort test
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
In his 1903 book Mankind in the Making , the British science-fiction novelist and social commentator Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) argued for a new type of political system in which society renounced any claim of absolute truths and people’s ideas were based on presented facts – a system in which overall policy and public affairs in society were scientifically examined in the light of mathematical and statistical reasoning. Wells would go on to argue that

The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. (Wells , [1903] 2014)
Wells, who was a biologist by training and one of the top science-fiction writers of the time, lived in the age of modern scientific utopias, marked by the rise of industrialization and workers’ struggles. However, what makes Wells’ contribution so relevant today is that he was standing up against Eugenics at a time when other intellectuals, including some fellow socialists, were siding with this racist pseudoscientific idea.
Wells was not opposed to a science of heredity, nevertheless he rejected the notion of Francis Galton (1822–1911), the father of modern statistics, that the state should intervene in order to breed human beings selectively. Positive traits such as beauty, health, capacity, and genius, as well as supposed negative traits such as criminality and alcoholism, says Wells, are in fact such complex entanglements of characteristics that ignorance and doubt bar our way. Still today at the Rijksmusem Boerhaave of science and medicine in Leiden, the Netherlands, the visitors can see some drawings of a facial angle, a geometrical system invented by the Dutch scientist Petrus Camper (1722–1789) and later used to justify slavery and racism. Wells’ extensive writings on equality and human rights would gain him the rare distinction of his work being incinerated in the Nazi book burnings of 8 April 1933 only to be taken in later years by the United Nations as a source of inspiration for the Universal Declarations of Human Rights (James, 2012 ; Partington, 2017 [2003] ).
In the age of Big Data, when statistics and the use of numbers in general are becoming increasingly essential in the practice of journalism (Baack, 2015 ; Borges-Rey, 2016 ), it is easy to forget that the very same numbers that today we prize as the culmination of the Enlightenment as a political project have served both to elucidate as well as to obscure our own understanding of society and its problems. We live in a time in which mathematical thinking has overwhelmingly taken over great chunks of our lives. Decisions set by algorithms determine for us the outcomes of credit checks, access to housing and even whom we could meet on a dating site – all this while influencing voters or exposing us to particular fake news items (Briant, 2018 ; O’Neil, 2016 ).
However, contrary to common assumptions, the relationship between journalists and statistics is neither new nor unique. Instead, it is part of a long and broad historic tradition where numbers have been used to create social reality and reassert authorial control over what is said to the public. It is a tradition that has both a history and politics of its own and that has played a pivotal role in asserting and challenging simultaneously the authority of certain narratives of power.
One of the most important aspects of this relationship is the way journalists have engaged and used statistics in perusing quality; a quest that has not only proven to be elusive and complex but also problematic at times, particularly in relation to how journalism has engaged with power. In this book, we explore the relationship between journalism and statistics in relation to how the former has used numbers to establish authority over truth while establishing its own legitimacy as an agent of power (Mattelart, 2019b ; Nguyen & Lugo-Ocando, 2016 ). In so doing, numbers have become an instrumental piece of the jigsaw puzzle to set journalists apart as ‘custodians of conscience’ (Ettema & Glasser, 1998 ).
We argue that beyond no