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Data Mining Rescues Investigative Journalism
John Mecklin sends in word of initiatives through which the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known as "computational journalism." "James Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, is in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable. The goal: Computer algorithms that can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public-interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. Or, in short, data mining in the public interest."
It doesn't matter how efficient journalistic gum-shoeing becomes, because the end product will still be subject to a certain amount of spin by the publisher.
so does this mean maybe reporters will stop pulling statistics out of their asses once they have a tool to provide reliable statistics with a minimum of effort?
But as it is, we can't get local news media to perform their "watchdog" role in most cases. I can't even begin to count the number of times when I've seen a case that looked suspicious as hell based on the reporting of it, but the local media just parroted the police/prosecutor's story and moved on. Alternatively, when they do get involved, it's often in cases like the Jena 6 where you end up finding out that the media was spreading disinformation and building up a narrative to make more profit.
Most news media have become a combination of an AP outlet and a source of editorials and classifieds. They're like a primitive RSS feed with some mashed up content thrown in there for local flair.
Investigative Journalism Rescues Data Mining
Red means stop and read it, green means go and read it.
rewriting history since 2109
SELECT *
FROM advertising_revenue_table, list_of_local_business_table
WHERE advertising_revenue_table.business_name = list_of_local_business_table.business_name
AND advertising_revenue_table.cost_of_ad_space_purchased = 100
AND list_of_local_business_table.owners NOT IN (select names from list_of_publishers_buddies)
ORDER BY cost_of_ad_space_purchased ASC
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The digital revolution didn't do-in journalism. That was Watergate. After that, and the Left's orgasm over the idea of reporters taking down presidents, propagandists are now all we have. Remember the 'fight' over which reporter would fly with Obama to Iraq, while no one was fighting to go with McCain all those times he went.
Ask them: "Why be a journalist?"
"To make a difference." is the reply.
By definition, journalists don't "make a difference", they tell a story. Propagandists "make a difference". Just ask Himmler.
It's gotten so bad that, despite all the channels, and all the money-losing newsrooms on cable/satellite TV, the stories all use the same words. It's because the left owns almost all of them.
Some might say this consensus makes them right, but it really doesn't. How many times is Fox News chided because they don't agree? Who's programmed, the TV, or us?
What they leave OUT of a story is just as important as what gets IN.
Until just the other day, Charlie Rose and (I think it was) Dan Rather were discussing Obama. "We don't know anything about him- who are his heroes?"
Meanwhile so much was known about "Joe the plumber" that he could barely get work in his town.
Meanwhile they sent 30+ reporters to scam information in Alaska about Palin, making up things when nothing was available.
But no...two years of investigation on Obama turned up nothing. Not a word on broadcast TV about Bill Ayers (an unrepentant bomber of the Pentagon and murderer who got free on a technicality). Not a word about Obama's heros like Saul Alinsky (sp?) who is so far Left he bumps elbows with Stalin.
These people are not in the periphery; these are people with whom he's tightly tied. But that doesn't matter any more, he's elected. Just remember you asked for it. He'll make history, alright.
But now I suppose, we expect reporters to dig through computer data, and the digital revolution might do something for the industry. Well after being the top radio show host for two decades, they still think Limbaugh is racist. (Not hard to disprove) or fat (that was a decade ago). Yeah, those reporters are really hard working investigators. All they need do is *listen* to the show, and they won't do that.
Journalism suffers from the same thing science does: loss of integrity. "Show me the money". And "vote for my guy". Truth no longer matters to these people, though it should to you.
This 'digital revolution' will do nothing but help THEIR causes, not truth.
The journalists groom their resources and need to keep in their sources good books to keep up access. Play ball and you get indented with a patrol so you can send back gripping combat footage. Piss off the brass and you get indented with the guys washing trucks at the transport park.
It is no wonder that editors and TV execs are quick to fire and distance themselves from any journalists that forget this and start snooping too deeply. Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Arnett
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's not what journalists don't know. It's what they don't report.
And basically people just don't care. Have we decided who to blame for the economy collapse yet? But bathroom foot tapping, wow, that's the shit we have to get to the bottom of it.
As someone who does investigative journalism for a living, data mining won't get you squat. Having done it for a living for 5+ years, and being very familiar with data mining, the two so rarely cross paths that it rounds to zero.
Why? Because if it is in minable form, it doesn't take any digging to find. If you can run a google search and get even a tidbit about what you need, you don't need investigative journalism.
Of the stories I have gotten, little ones like the P4 going 64 bits, it never reaching 4GHz, Dell exploding laptops (an assist on that one), and more recently the Nvidia bump cracking problem(s), none of that would have been possible through data mining.
If it is out there, it doesn't need an investigative journalist. If it isn't, than data mining won't help. The end.
-Charlie
The Cline Center for Democracy at UIUC has been running a data mining project, scanning archives and contents of newspapers around the world for reports of political disturbances such as riots &tc. The project, a collaboration between the center and the UIUC CS department, is meant to facilitate research on domestic stability and the like. Currently it's focused primarily on English papers, but efficiency and completeness will dictate searches in other languages sooner or later.
Information can be suppressed or 'spun', but at least this will ensure that the data's available for such evaluations instead of paying some graduate student peanuts for years and years to put it together.
Of course it does mean that I'm sort of out of a job...
To me a journalist is someone who provides the raw data. In the "Web 2.0" world (pardon the buzzword), anybody can do the data mining and editorializing, and it's great to be able to read different interpretations of the same data by different people.
This is what happens in the sabermetrics world (i.e. baseball stats analysis). Some source provides the raw data, but people merrily discuss and disagree on its meaning on various blog sites. There is none of this confusing mix of data and biased interpretation that you get in most news reporting nowadays.
If a blog is commercially successful, it will be an incentive to the blogger to dig out more raw data, or rather get a journalist to find him some, as it's not necessarily the same skill.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
If you're in the world of investigative journalism I'd encourage you to take a look at a new class of semantic data generation tools. New capabilities like Calais (www.opencalais.com) from Thomson Reuters allow you to ingest unstructured text (news articles, press releases, FOIA documents, whatever) and automatically extract semantic metadata like people, companies, management changes, natural disasters and hundreds of others. You can take the output of these tools and load them directly into databases to query. You could take news stories and build a social network of family relationships then play news events against the network. We're already seeing some initial uses in the area of investigative journalism and would love to see more. Jump in and give it a try.
> a new academic and professional discipline
> known as "computational journalism."
Differing only in complexity but not principle from the same sort of search engine journalism that's resulted in decline of both accountability and accuracy of news over the past decade. Perhaps some investigative journalism into the lack of actual investigation into investigation is in order. "Hits" != veracity.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You may as well rename this, "Crackpottery goes mainstream". Instead of calling a few people, doing a couple of interviews, writing up their impressions as a story, journalists will now have automation to help them do what nuts do. Just like so-called UFO, alien and jfk assassination researchers do manually, journalists will be able to arrange players, dates and events to fit any tale imaginable. Government, UN, corporate, environmental conspiracy stories will abound, and the sky is the limit.
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