Ask Slashdot: Can US Citizens Trust Government Data? (msn.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @01:00AM from the fiction-or-non-fiction dept.

mmell writes: An editorial in the Washington Post and made publicly available via an MSN news feed has asked the question: "In the Trump administration era of 'alternative facts,' what happens to government data?" Given that Slashdot members (and readers) may represent a somewhat more in-the-know crowd on matters concerning data integrity and trustworthiness, I thought this would be a good place to ask: can we trust (or has anyone ever really trusted) government data? One might think government data would all be cut 'n' dried and not subject to manipulation, but I personally remember when government data back early in the Reagan presidency went from reporting nearly 15% unemployment nationwide to well under 6% by redefining what "unemployed" meant. So . . . has government data ever been trustworthy, and is it still so?

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Re:Gov't data by Layzej · 2017-01-24 02:56 · Score: 5, Informative

And independent analysis shows that the NOAA analysis is extremely accurate and even better than the competition.
It is not likely that the data would become tained. More likely the new administration would just stop collecting inconvenient data, or change the metric as described in the summary.