Margaret Sullivan | New York Times
Mark Twain complained about “lies, damned lies and statistics” more than a century ago. “Figures often beguile me,” he wrote, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself.” Now, in a numbers-soaked era when the word “algorithm” seems to be on everyone’s lips and entire news outlets, like Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight or The Times’s own Upshot, are based on interpreting statistics, some core journalistic questions arise: How important is data to reporting? And does it get readers closer to the truth or obscure it?
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here