Journalism and data analysis

The occasion is Nate Silver and the data-based predictions of the US election, but Mark Coddington raises a much more general point about the difference between ways of knowing things in journalism and science.

The journalistic norm of objectivity is more than just a careful neutrality or attempt to appear unbiased; for journalists, it’s the grounds on which they claim the authority to describe reality to us. And the authority of objectivity is rooted in a particular process.

But science finds things out differently, so journalists and scientists have difficulty communicating with each other.  In political journalism, the journalist gets access to insider information from multiple sources, cross-checks it, evaluates it for reliability, and tells us things we didn’t know.  In data-based journalism there aren’t inside secrets. Anyone could put together these information sources, and quite a few people did.  It doesn’t take any of the skills and judgment that journalists learn; it takes different skills and different sorts of judgment.

TL;DR: Political journalists are skeptical of Nate Silver because they don’t understand and don’t trust the means by which he knows what he knows. And they don’t understand it because it’s completely different from journalists have always known things, and how they’ve claimed authority to declare those things to the public.