One key aspect that elicits the importance of data journalism is the role it has undertaken in society. One of the main functions of a journalist is to always question. And data, in the context of journalism, provides a substantiative resource that fills the void created when questioning whether something is credible or not. It provides a sense of rationality to the reader when the journalist makes a claim. However, it’s important to note that as data journalists, when you begin to work with data you are inherently using a tool rooted in bias– Culture, context and society are woven into data, whether recognized or not. And when presenting this data to the public, through a medium that is often perceived as unbiased, it is your responsibility to address this. The role of the data journalist in today’s society is to provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for any particular claim, and it is their responsibility to be inclusive as possible; particularly when addressing social issues.
In Chapter 2 of Queer Data, Kevin Guyan supports this by quoting, “ …data collection processes… are productive and highly political practices though which (only) certain LGB(TI)Q populations are counted.” As a data journalist, it is important to recognized this, especially if you are covering topics concerning the community. It should be noted that simply recognizing this bias is not sufficient. Ethical factors of collection, awareness to gaps in the data, protecting at-risk communities from harm, advocating for inclusion within the dataset, are all contributing factors a data journalist should keep in mind. Failing to account for these only furthers the cultural paradigm that pushes these community to the fringes of the social spotlight.
This idea directly leads to what Criado-Perez describes in “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”. When we don’t address these “cultural norms” embedded into data, it is possible to create situations that directly harm individuals. Criado-Perez notes that in a 2016 paper there was “significantly higher transcription error rates for women than men.” Not addressing gender disparities has a significant impact on the livelihood of women. As a data journalist, if you were to use this paper, it’s your responsibility to uncover and address this disparity to prevent further “credibility” of that dataset. If you are not questioning the data, you are only doing half of your job as a data journalist.
Alex Howard highlights this concept in his talk, “Data Journalism in the Second Machine Age”. He states, “gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data to support the creation of acts in journalism.” If we use data left uncheck, we are not fulfilling our role as data journalists in modern society. It is the data journalists responsibility to account for any embedded bias, to ensure safe and fair use of data and the populations therein.
