Farai Chideya's 'Quant of the Now Now'

Journalist Farai Chideya repeats that field reporting combined with data bring the least biased result of a journalism assignment. She worked for a time at fivethirtyeight.com and now hosts a new show called "Our Body Politic". She told Slate of a fallacy she found in datahead culture that she assigned a catchy name.

Chideya: I try to present stories on the rise of racial resentment as voter indicator time and time again at five thirty eight. And I was told, well, there’s no data to support it. There is. It’s historical data and I think that places like five thirty eight specialized in what I call the quant of the now now which is like what are polls. But if you look at the facts, listen to this fact. The only modern politicians who are not from the major two parties to have gotten Electoral College wins were both segregationists.

Slate: Hmm. That’s data. You know, right, but it’s data from far out and so it was discounted.

Chideya: Yeah, but why was it discounted? I mean, I think it was discounted because we thought we were better than the past. And that is a cultural bias in and of itself.

As recently as 2018, that data could be biased was not obvious. It's much more obvious now.

Chideya is someone who brings variegation to many subjects which previously had been squashed into either-or simplistics.


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Further Listening:

Did the Media Fail the Trump Years?:   slate.com  🎙️







This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.