Middle ground sought between extremes
This week, statistician/writer/journalist Nate Silver (the guy who used stats to predict the outcome of the 2012 election, state-by-state, and got it right in 50 out of 50 of them) unveiled his latest project, FiveThirtyEight, a “data journalism” news organization and website that employs 20 full-time writers and operates under a manifesto of studying, and reporting on, data, and only data.
That means no punditry or opinions, no right-or-left leaning ideology, no emotional anecdotes or stories. Silver seems to see this as a new era of reporting.
In his writing, Silver often cites a metaphor of the hedgehog and the fox. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” he writes.
Silver and his organization is the fox, of course: sharp, always taking in new information and applying it to forming new ideas and opinions. And, not surprisingly, he takes some pretty specific digs at opinion columnists. We are, he says, the hedgehogs. He writes:
“The op-ed columnists … are probably the most hedgehoglike people. They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions from them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week.”
He blames part of the problem on the fact that math-minded people don’t pursue journalism as a career. Instead, abstract writers and thinkers — essentially, emotional people — do that job, while the math majors go on to do other, more mathy things (for the record, I hate math). Thus, says Silver, hard data doesn’t make its way into much of modern journalism.
This gave me pause. Was I, as Silver said of op-ed columnists (admittedly writing for a much smaller-market newspaper than the New York Times), not “doing a lot of original thinking”? Was I “just spitting out the same column week after week”?
And I came to a conclusion: yes, actually. I am.
I can’t stop writing about income inequality and the way the working poor in America keep getting ground to dust by the toes of billionaires’ boots. To me, it’s the most important issue of our time, and I’d say 60-70 percent (math!) of my columns deal with this issue in one way or another.
And I’ll admit that I do come to this issue from an emotional place. Even when hard data are involved — data inserted into charts that show one line climbing steeply up the graph (share of America’s income among the top one percent) while another stays roughly the same (share of income among the bottom 60 percent) — I have an emotional reaction fueled by my own worldview: People should treat each other fairly, and people should not go hungry when others hoard billions.
I’ve taken Silver’s ideas to heart, however. In general, his philosophy of holding up numbers, facts and flexibility of thought as the most important aspect of journalism is difficult to disagree with, even if it seems a little cold and lacking in one essential … humanity.
Case in point: Today, I had planned to write about the “NASA-funded study” that predicts the impending collapse of society as we know it. Perhaps you caught wind of that study this week. Basically, the research suggests our global society is beginning to show the hallmarks of collapse. Income inequality is one of them. The Romans had it, and the Mayans had it. And they both fell. Given my tendency to write about income inequality, it was an easy choice of topic for me.
But then came a couple of glaring flaws with the way this story is being reported. The first offenders are the news sources that are “click-baiting,” or framing a story in such a way that people will be compelled to read and share it, thus netting more clicks and more advertising revenue. Like this one, from a site called PolicyMic, which offers the headline: “NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will End, And It’s Not Looking Good for Us.” And the first line of the article: “Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn’t it? Too bad it’s not going to [last] much longer.”
Really, how is that helping to inform people? It’s stirring them into an emotional froth (I can’t tell you how many people reposted this article on my Facebook feed), and it’s not telling the truth. The researchers predicted our civilization will collapse decades from now, not, like, tomorrow. And NASA released an official statement distancing itself from the research. As it turns out, the study was completely independent of NASA. They just used a research model that NASA funded for a totally different study. And, yet, headline after headline calls it a “NASA study.”
So, we have two poles of journalism: that based in data and that based in emotion-for-ad-revenue. It’s not looking pretty either way. But surely there’s a middle ground between the fox and the hedgehog?