Reading three
Cabreros, Irineo. Opinion: Side-Stepping Safeguards, Data Journalists Are Doing Science Now. Undark. April 2021
Read the text and answer the questions below | Answers at the end of the page
Question 1
What claim does the author mention from the Washington Post’s most read online piece?
Question 2
Which argument has ‘stuck in the collective consciousness’ according to the author: the 2016 Propublica Machine Bias article, or the rebuttal?
Question 3
How can journalists mitigate what the author calls the ‘danger of speedy publication’?
Question 4
What should journalists provide so their work is reproducible: data or code?
Answers
1 That social distancing usually outperforms attempted quarantine in a pandemic
“News outlets have asserted, on the basis of in-house data analyses, that […] social distancing will usually outperform attempted quarantine. That last item, produced by The Washington Post and buoyed by in-house computer simulations, was the most read article in the history of the publication’s website”
2
The ProPublica argument
“the ProPublica argument has stuck in the collective consciousness in a way that the scientific rebuttals — published in academic outlets with comparatively small readerships — have not. It continues to be widely cited today, both in news articles and in scholarly work.”
3
Speedy correction
“If serious errors are identified, the original article should be amended or retracted, and notice of the amendment or retraction should be visible to all future visitors of the article. The danger of speedy publication can be mitigated by speedy correction. “
4
Data and code
“Efforts at reproducibility have been made by some outlets, but they have been inconsistent and often incomplete. For instance a New York Times article on “the pandemic’s hidden death toll” includes a link to the relevant dataset, but not to any of the code used to analyze it.”