# The innate partisan nature of data journalism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 19, 2014, 9:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479 "2014-04-19T09:27:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2014, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/41 "2014-04-21T22:36:44Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > Thank you for crystallizing the liberal view so plainly. You have a hammer so everything is a nail. If you really think that women’s pay is a problem, start a company offering above market pay for women. All the underpaid women will come work for you and you will take over the market. Women’s pay will be greater and you will get rich. Maybe you don’t like money but the problem will be solved. Okay, with all due respect, are you serious? You focus entirely on one portion of my post, ignoring both the entire rest of it and numerous other entirely valid criticisms of your point, and try to act like what you’re almost criminally misquoting is evidence that all liberals want is more big government. Um… no. You pointed to a series of systemic, long-standing problems which very much seem to require government intervention and basically said “liberals can only think of government solutions to these problems”. Geez, I wonder why! It’s like when alt-med advocates say “Doctors can only think of invasive solutions to these problems” when talking about cancer. No kidding; _nothing else we’ve found works_. Hey, got a proposal that might make sense or work? Great! Let’s see it! Because your solution to “women, as a whole, get paid less than men for the same work” is absolutely not credible. A single, local solution to a systemic, nation-wide problem is not going to fix things. Even if we assume we can get the company to the size of Wal-Mart, it _still_ wouldn’t solve the problem for anyone other than our own employees. It would be like combatting the problem of pollution-spewing companies by starting a corporation pledged to a net neutral carbon footprint - that’s nice, but it does nothing to stop Exxon from decimating the water table. But here’s something for you to ponder on. If the free market could solve these problems… _Why hasn’t it?_ It’s been quite a long time, and these trends show little to no signs of stopping, let alone reversing. Most solutions proposed are utterly faith-based, with no reason to assume that they’ll make a difference. > [@](#): > > It is like that over and over again, see a problem start a company, start a charity, start an informational campaign? No, call Uncle Sugar. He always know what to do. Start a company? To solve economic downturn? What, you mean risk my very limited assets during a time of massive economic downturn where people willing to invest in my product or buy my goods are going to be fairly limited, with the knowledge that if I fail, getting a job again will be a nightmare? From the perspective of a capitalist, that seems like a _terrible_ idea! Better wait until things get better… Solving wage inequality by making a company is like solving pollution by recycling - it’s a nice touch, but collectively, you’re doing nothing of any real meaning. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2014, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/42 "2014-04-21T22:56:19Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > ACORN never engaged in the kind of ballot stuffing they were accused of. Nor the pimp-enabling, neither. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2014, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/43 "2014-04-21T23:02:13Z")
[FTR, The Straight Dope on ACORN:](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/ACORN) > [@](#): > > **ACORN,** the **Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now** is a now-defunct organization originally intended to help on matters of “neighborhood safety,” voter registration, health care, affordable housing and other social issues. > > In the 2008 US Presidential Election, conservative activists decided to ignore all that and instead pick on it for two of the only good things ACORN ever did. The organisation allegedly helping African Americans vote - oh the horrors - and then again in 2009, when shyster James O’Keefe went undercover asking ACORN for advice on how to practice free market capitalism[1] and then leaked the video to the public, which was hyped by Andrew Breitbart. The videos were deemed to be selectively edited and partially fabricated to make it seem like ACORN employees were giving advice on how to break the law. Lobbying for more laws and regulations is apparently okay, but giving advice on how to DIY and get off the government teat through good ol’ free enterprise is apparently not. > > The controversy that followed generated enough negative publicity to have ACORN’s funding pulled, and caused the organization to collapse and disband in March, 2010,[2] allowing people the chance to undo any of the work ACORN did helping minority groups vote. > > If it weren’t for ACORN’s duplicity, America would not be suffering under her first Kenyan Muslim Presidential Dictatorship. > > **Actual ACORN controversies** > > Or, what drove the molehill mountaineering: > ##During the 2008 elections, a few ACORN employees engaged in fraud. However, this was not ballot box stuffing as many claim, but falsification of voter registration forms in order to get paid for work they didn’t do. In other words, laziness rather than conspiracy. The FBI was even called in and found no evidence of “widespread fraud.” > ##During July of 2008, the brother of ACORN’s founder Wade Rathke, Dale embezzled close to $1,000,000 from the organization. Both were removed from the executive committee and the money was repaid by the Rathkes and a third donor. > ##Barack Obama served as an attorney for ACORN in a voting rights lawsuit in 1995, made two donations (of $70,000 and $75,000) to ACORN in the early 2000s as a director of the Woods Fund, and donated $800,000 to an ACORN-affiliated group for a get-out-the-vote campaign. (NB: This is only controversial to wingnuts) ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2014, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/44 "2014-04-21T23:53:11Z")
I haven’t read the whole article but if the quoted part is key then it is claptrap: > [@](#): > > Only one side of the debate cared about accurate empirical measures of the health-care law, because only one side hinged its view of the law on whether it actually worked. Evaluating health care, or other government programs, by objective criteria sounds perfectly neutral. But to do so is to disregard the deep moral belief held by most conservatives that big government is inherently wrong. The empirical evenhandedness of the new data journalists is a wonderful contribution to American public life. It is, however, anything but politically neutral. If one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” then it is not politically biased for a journalist to check and conclude A is true. However, at least from what is quoted in the OP, this commentator seems to consider that - if one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and - the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” but really knows that A is true but doesn’t want to implement the Policy because of other idealogical reasons, then journalists are not being politically neutral if they conclude A is true. This is arrant nonsense. One makes one’s bed and then one lies in it. If the latter party are making false statements and not making their true position clear then it doesn’t constitute a journalistic breach of neutrality to deal with that party’s position on its face It would be a failure of political neutrality for the media to be the body defining the bounds of the debate and for the media to then conclude that within those bounds the facts favoured one position, but I don’t understand that to be what the OP-linked article said happened in the Obamacare case. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/45 "2014-04-22T00:04:04Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > Sigh. > > I can put my point in less polemical terms if you want. It is probably too late for that–particularly on the SDMB–but it would certainly have made this discussion more interesting if a more nuanced response had made it into the few few posts. As it is, (and probably will be forever), we are going to get one more partisan bicker-fest with each side standing up and chanting their mantras at each other and neither side actually understanding what their opponents really believe. Sigh, indeed. ---
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/46 "2014-04-22T00:28:19Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > I haven’t read the whole article but if the quoted part is key then it is claptrap: > > If one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” then it is not politically biased for a journalist to check and conclude A is true. > > However, at least from what is quoted in the OP, this commentator seems to consider that > > - if one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and > > - the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” but really knows that A is true but doesn’t want to implement the Policy because of other idealogical reasons, > > then journalists are not being politically neutral if they conclude A is true. This is arrant nonsense. One makes one’s bed and then one lies in it. If the latter party are making false statements and not making their true position clear then it doesn’t constitute a journalistic breach of neutrality to deal with that party’s position on its face I’d read the whole article. The point is not that the journalists are per se partisan, but that they will be seen as such. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/47 "2014-04-22T00:37:46Z")
Having now read the article, I stand by what I’ve said. The author (Chait) says “The empirical evenhandedness of the new data journalists is a wonderful contribution to American public life. It is, however, anything but politically neutral”. What he’s missing is that: - the new data journalists _only check the facts in debate_, as the examples he gives in his article show; - it would constitute political bias for them \*not \*to do so, and - political parties control the debate by choosing what points to propose and dispute; they choose the battleground. It does not in any way constitute journalist non-neutrality to fact check what is happening on the battleground. In other words, to use the example Chait uses, if Ryan didn’t want a debate on “the budgetary assumptions undergirding the health-care bill” then he shouldn’t have “forcefully rebutted” those assumptions. If Ryan wanted the debate to be about underlying non-empirical idealogy, then all he had to do was _say so_ and then the fact checking journalists would have had nothing to fact check. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/48 "2014-04-22T00:39:31Z")
> [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](#): > > I’d read the whole article. The point is not that the journalists are per se partisan, but that they will be seen as such. Nah. Where do you get that from? ---
**Author:** ![2sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/2/e47774/32.png) [@2sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/2sense)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/49 "2014-04-22T00:42:27Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > The problem with the government is a tool argument is that government is the worlds only tool that does everything. If I had a pill I claimed could help fat people lose weight, skinny people gain weight, relieve diarrhea and constipation, made your skin tanner and your teeth whiter, you would probably be skeptical that I was shilling the pill and not just a disinterested scientist. I don’t understand the comparison. Government is just a way of organizing human endeavors. Humans are endlessly creative so of course we can do a lot of things. It took you a single sentence to lay out everything this amazing drug can accomplish. If you typed for the rest of your life you couldn’t do the same for humans and that’s just the things we can do now. There will be so many more possibilities by the time you die. > [@](#): > > Here is a thought experiment, suppose there was a group called the church of big government, that for religious reasons wanted the government to grow in size and to provide the solution for any problem you could think of. How would the adherents to this faith act any differently than liberals do now? The only difference I can think of is that they would think of military spending differently. The jumping off point for the article in the OP is that the results of Obamacare actually matter on the left. If it were failing then it would lose support among us and become vulnerable to repeal. Only to your hypothetical religious people and real life conservatives does the fact that it _is_ succeeding _not_ matter. > [@](#): > > It may be possible to conceive of a pre-school program that helps kids, but the one we have Head Start, does not. The Head Start Impact Study was run by the HHS from 2002-2010. Its findings "children’s attendance in Head Start has no demonstrable impact on their academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade. " Since that report came out 25 billion dollars has been spent on Head Start. I’m not completely in the dark. I’m somewhat aware of these results but I’m not familiar with the criticism of them. In any case, this misses my point. Americans, right and left, act as if preschool matters. We put our money where our mouth is, assuming we have the money for it, and pay to prepare our children for kindergarten. That is the reality that matters and not these studies that relatively few people have heard of. If you are right and the idea that preschool percolates through society to the point that people stop paying for it then there won’t be any more Head Start program. > [@](#): > > It is a good first step that you are willing to admit your biases. But it does not get to the heart of the problem. Funding disparities would be unjust if funding was the same thing as education but it is not. Since 1970 per pupil spending has doubled while test scores have not increased. If increased funding makes education better that would be one thing but it does not. Again, Americans act as if this isn’t true. When a family is buying a home a lot of attention is payed to what the schools are like. A home costs more if it is in a good school district and even solidly conservative school districts are able to raise millage rate. Perhaps you are right that the money doesn’t matter but that’s not the reality people see around them every day. > [@](#): > > Of course you don’t care about the money, it is not your money. If it was your money being spent, you would care. It’s just as much not your money as it’s not mine. How come you care? > [@](#): > > No one ever said that welfare reform would end all poverty and recessions permanently. What was said was that it would encourage people to go to work instead of living on welfare. It was a success in that it got millions of people off the dole and without increasing poverty. We don’t know that it hasn’t increased poverty. The “poverty rate” only measures whether families are above or below an arbitrary income level. The fact that this rate didn’t increase after 1996 doesn’t mean that life isn’t a hell of a lot more miserable for those kids stuck on the wrong side of the line. Does anyone honestly believe that it’s in the interest of children to have their mothers return to work promptly after they are born? ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2014, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479/50 "2014-04-22T01:46:00Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > • No WMDs were ever found in Iraq The problem here is that that point is itself a deflection. The justification for invading Iraq was the dubious assertion that _Saddam Hussein was a threat to the region and/or the US_. I challenge anyone to present salient evidence to support that premise. Failing that, the war in Iraq really starts to look at best like a foolish misadventure, at worst a hideous fraud perpetrated by con artists. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-innate-partisan-nature-of-data-journalism/686479.md?page=2)