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This book looks at how numbers and statistics have been used to underpin quality in news reporting. In doing so, the aim is to challenge some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. It seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.
Martinisi and Lugo-Ocando’s detailed empirical study of data-driven crime and health news coverage in mainstream British papers confirms that “Big Data” is no panacea for achieving “Quality Journalism”. As their book’s wide-ranging literature review shows, this neoliberal fallacy about methods of math enlightenment in the “Infosphere” reaches back to Condorcet’s “Social Mathematics” as a hallmark of the liberal faith during the French Revolution. — Michael Hofmann, Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, US.
List of Illustrations; Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Numbers as information in the Information Society; Chapter 3: The never-ending debate on quality in journalism; Chapter 4: Statistics in journalism practice and principle; Chapter 5: The normative importance of ‘quality’ in Journalism; Chapter 6: Journalism meets statistics in real life; Chapter 7: The ideology of Statistics in the News; Epilogue; References; Index.