News article analysis

If you’ve never heard about FiveThirtyEight (from now on FTE) you are in for a treat. That is if politics and polling are right up your alley. Nate Silver is a skilled statistician and editor in chief of FTE. The site provides analysis that’s heavily reliant on statistics provided by outside pollers as well as statistical analysis models developed by SIlver himself. Sports and Politics are the center of attention of FTE, and their models have proven to be very successful (last election results notwithstanding).
The story in question is titled “Can a Democrat Really Win a Senate Race in Tennessee? Or Mississippi?!?! Analysis based on hard data of this specificity is hard to question. It requires a significant knowledge and a proficiency in the statistical field that makes it hard for the journalist writing the piece to veer away from what would be considered true or to make false statements. This very same level of specificity is responsible for what it would be considered a loyalty to citizens. It seems very unlikely that political parties or other kinds of institutions could bend the results of articles that are the result of journalism that’s extremely reliant on hard data. It’s also clear that political institutions don’t exercise any influence on this particular media, and on this particular story, so it can be considered that it’s practitioners are free from influence from those they cover.
Another principle of journalism that can be clearly identified here is the effort to make the significant (in this case, the possibility of an electoral surprise in traditionally conservative states like Tennessee and Mississippi) interesting and relevant. It provides context, visually appealing data, audio-visual elements, and a well-structured argument that makes reading it an effortless task. It also presents the argument in a comprehensive and proportional manner. Again, polling data and informed analysis are the base of the article, as well as a number of possible scenarios that compel the reader to think and process the information that’s been relayed to him or her.
To sum it up, this article in particular, as well as the outlet as a whole, has a great tradition of providing quality analysis that’s devoid of political intentions. It lays out the possible scenarios that are born of the analysis of the public data available to the public as a whole, using an extremely sophisticated set of tools, making their articles some of the most fascinating pieces of specialized journalism you can find on the internet nowadays. That, paired with the protection provided by the presence of hard data and the implied independence associated with them, is one of the most powerful tools that journalists and citizens have to fight against the uncertainty that plagues journalism in today’s world.

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

Melissa Noel and Her Reporting on "Barrel Children"

Melissa Noel is an award-winning freelance journalist. She has worked for NBCNews.com, Huffington Post, Caribbean Beat Magazine and Voices of New York and the recipient of a Pulitzer Center grant to report on Caribbean children left behind by their parents when they migrate to another country.  On November 28th, she stopped by LaGuardia to talk about her reporting, the challenges she faced, the opportunities she found, and the children at the center of these stories. Being the daughter of Caribbean parents, from Guyana, to be more specific, it was only natural that this subject didn’t seem foreign to her. In early 2016 Noel attended a Caribbean Film Academy screening in Brooklyn of the short film “Auntie” by Barbadian filmmaker and Barrel Stories Project founder Lisa Harewood. Both the fictional film and the documentary project highlight some of the very real ways migration and separation impact Caribbean families. After the screening, she met Melissa Elias, originally from Tri...
Leer más

News Matters response

The notion that journalism is a public service is not widely spread among society. Most journalists might certainly understand it that way, but in recent times it’s been more than clear that the public doesn’t completely trust in the capabilities or rather, the motivation, of the Fourth Estate to exercise as a watchdog of government. Certainly, this lack of trust has hindered the ability of the media to exercise as checks and balances with the three branches of government. It’s very hard to demand accountability when the public trust doesn’t back the effort. The first chapter of News Matters is a powerful reminder of the responsibilities of the media, as well as the consequences of both good journalism and bad journalism. It’s a good reminder that when exercised correctly, journalism can impact the lives of the community it serves in a highly positive manner. Corrupt officials and the party structures that sustain them can be brought down with methodic and responsible use of good j...
Leer más

Chapter 11 - Pushing Civil Rights Into the National Agenda

The struggle to achieve equality for African-Americans wasn’t over with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Polling taxes, grandfather clauses, and outright intimidation were some of the tactics used for the next hundred years to restrict voting rights for people of color. “Separate but equal” was the slogan and driving force behind the segregationist movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, considerable momentum began to build around the idea that segregation was as harmful as voter suppression. Journalism, and TV, to be more precise, was the catalyst for that change in public opinion.  Brown vs Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”, the Court ruled. In the summer of 1957, African-American leaders in Little Rock tested the Supreme Court decision by enrolling nine black s...
Leer más