10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17498
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2038-3460
17498
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Valeria Burgio
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Christopher William Anderson, Apostles of Certainty. Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt, Oxford University Press, 2018
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Book Reviews
2021-11-01
2023-06-27
2021-11-01
2023-10-19
119-122
TS
Valeria Burgio
2021/11/01
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17498
119
Independent researcher
2038-3460
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en
122
Christopher William Anderson, Apostles of Certainty. Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt, Oxford University Press, 2018
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17498/16343
12
Book Reviews                                                                119
   Christopher William Anderson
Apostles of Certainty. Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 228

Valeria Burgio independent researcher

    Anderson’s book is a historic reconstruction of how data are used, in
journalism, to build a culture of truth and objectivity. Far from being the
exclusive prerogative of Data Journalism, the use of data dates back to the
time when sociology and journalism were attempting to build a scientific
basis for their undertakings, developing a social research methodology of
a quantitative nature. This was especially true of the United States in the
first half of the twentieth century. The book therefore reviews the phases
of this attempt by journalism to pursue the methodological rigour and
mathematical foundations of the more survey-based social sciences, high-
lighting the mutual mistrust between the discipline of sociology and the
practice of journalism. Moreover, it illustrates the difficulties encountered
by journalism schools, not only to enter the academic world, but also to
include the study of scientific subjects such as statistics in their curriculum.
    It all started in the early twentieth century with the growing popularity,
in the Anglo-Saxon world, of the survey research: a social analysis based
on the collection, through door-to-door surveys, and on the processing of
data. In particular, Anderson meticulously examines an American move-
ment that has largely been ignored in academic research, the Men and Re-
ligion Forward Movement, viewing it within the context of a more general
proliferation of quantitative investigation techniques. In a context of reli-
gion-based activism and social reformism (hence the reference to “apos-
tles” in the title), the intent became to base a “culture of truth” on data as
a form of factual evidence. Both data journalism and empirical survey-
based social sciences appear to be rooted in this movement. However, as
Anderson notes, the development of social sciences from the 1920s to the
1940s emphasized the disciplinary boundaries that divided it from journal-
ism: as revealed by the author’s content analysis on a body of scientific
sociological journals of those years, sociology considered journalism to be
a lesser rigorous field of social investigation, whose purpose was to create
communities of opinion, rather than to conduct social research. Unlike
journalism, social sciences, based on positivism, drew increasing inspira-
tion from the natural sciences. Consequently they presented themselves as
objective and empirical sciences that sought to “meet rigorous standards
of objectivity, verifiability and generality” (p. 88), just like the hard sci-
ences. One way to do this was to observe statistical rigour in the research
methodologies, which led to a visualisation of precise and accurate but
hard to interpret mathematical models.
    A central figure in the book is the journalist and academic Philip Meyer
120                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

who, in the 1960s, sought to reconcile journalism and social sciences
through Precision Journalism, the goal of which was to apply quantitative
methods to news reporting. Capitalizing on the developments in computer
science, precision journalism based investigative reporting on the recogni-
tion of patterns, on the emergence of data correlation and trends. This was
a decisively innovative proposition in a news world dominated by the new-
narrative journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion. Meyer
sought “to treat journalism as if it were a science, adapting scientific meth-
ods, scientific objectivity and scientific ideals to the entire process of mass
communication” (Meyer 1991, quoted at p. 116). Meyer had an intuition
(and then confirmation, given that he is still alive) of how important tech-
nological development would become to the field of journalism for seeking
evidence in news reporting. As machines progressively moved from the
back of the newsroom to the front-desk, databases were preparing to be-
come not only useful tools for market research or starting points for fancy
visualisations, but first and foremost the epistemological foundation for the
practice of journalism.
     In the meantime, however, databases had become fundamental tools
for qualitative methodologies: Anderson dedicates a chapter to computa-
tional journalism, a system of news reporting based on cross-checking and
an assessment of the coherence between one news item and another based
on available databases, hence on semantic and algorithmic criteria.
     One of the many merits of this finely documented book is the relativi-
sation of the impact of the so-called digital revolution that began in the
1990s. The change in practices was due primarily to the speed and ease of
tracking news, and was not accompanied by a shift in the epistemology of
journalism, which had long sought in data, and not just in facts, irrefutable
proof of the news. This was already evident in the “discourse” of journalists
relative to their own practices: according to a content analysis conducted
on publications aimed at journalism professionals, such as Editor & Pub-
lisher (1907-2016), the new computer technologies and access to databases
would not in and of themselves be a guarantee of hewing closer to reality,
but might rather accelerate and facilitate existing practices.
     Data visualisation on the other hand is not a central argument in this
book, whose focus of interest lies more in the epistemological foundations
of data journalism than in their translation into graphics. There are how-
ever some ideas on the subject that deserve further exploration: the only
images in this book are excerpted from Messages of the Men and Religion
Forward Movement and are a condensation of what not to do in visualisa-
tion given that, as Anderson himself points out, they omit numbers and use
approximative techniques of visual translation. Despite their scant scien-
tific rigour, the author uses these images to demonstrate the merit of this
pioneering movement, which offered visible numerical proof of wide-
spread social problems, thereby increasing public awareness and stimulat-
Book Reviews                                                              121
ing bottom-up policies of a clearly progressive nature. Rather than a truth-
ful representation of reality, these investigations thus served to mobilise
public opinion and awaken political consciences. Their role was of a more
persuasive nature, in the sense that they relied on a certain type of visual
rhetoric associated more readily with advertising than with analysis. Those
were the years that Michael Friendly labelled as “the dark age of data vis-
ualisation” (Friendly 2008, 529), when data visualisation disappeared from
the sciences, because it was considered illustrational and lowbrow, but en-
joyed widespread popularity in post-war attempts at informing the public,
particularly in Germany, where the pictorial statistics of Isotype were being
developed. Because he restricted the geographical sphere of his analysis to
the United States, Anderson does not mention these European experiences
and omits all information regarding the move from pre-Nazi Europe to the
USA, especially in the person of Rudolph Modley. Anderson does however
remark on the progress made in the field of visual journalism in the United
States in the 1950s, which witnessed a proliferation of magazines rich in
data visualisations, such as Survey Graphics and Fortune, models for con-
temporary data journalism.
    Anderson on the one hand richly documents the history of the devel-
opment of an ideology, that of journalistic objectivity, which generated
something of a sect embodied in a variety of figures in different historical
periods: the “apostles” in the title of the book are the journalists engaged
in an almost religious search for objectivity and truth. On the other hand,
he distances himself from this ideology, which still attempts to stand
proudly, and sometimes unquestioningly, against the populist fake-news
factory. The “culture of truth” would seek to lead journalism towards a
rather simplistic view of how information can become certainty and would
omit an important element in the process of newsmaking: the recognition
of the doubts, errors and corrections that must be addressed along the path
towards reliable reporting. The mechanisms for fabricating “fake news”
are in fact inherent in the production logic of contemporary journalism,
which is integrated into a social-mediated space, and they cannot be con-
sidered to be the product of an imaginary antagonist against which honest
journalism must take a stand.
    Through the lens of STS, the author expresses his perplexity about
whether data alone can guarantee the objectivity of investigative journal-
ism: because databases are often provided by governments, they have cer-
tain limits with respect to the phenomena they serve to quantify. Quoting
Star and Bowker (2000), Anderson reminds us that databases, only appar-
ently objective, are always the result of a process that in making choices,
includes and excludes. In the words of Bruno Latour, “one should never
speak of ‘data’ – what is given – but rather of sublata, that is, of ‘achieve-
ments’” (Latour 1999, 42). Or one should speak of capta (Drucker 2011),
objects selected and categorized by someone towards a specific end, rather
than fragments of reality.
122                                                               Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

    The chronological account of the evolution of the culture of truth in
journalism shows that objectivity is subject to historical relativism, and in
this sense, the book echoes the famous work by Daston and Galison (2007)
on the evolution of the concept of objectivity in scientific discourse: at one
period in time it means neutrality and the coexistence of different voices
and points of view (the “she said/he said” approach); in another period it
meant “second order objectivity”, which considers the database as a col-
lection of transparent elements that unambiguously translate facts as they
are. In the evolution of his thinking, manifested in the corrections and pref-
aces to the various editions of his book Precision Journalism (which
counted four editions, each of them revised and corrected, between 1973
and 2002), Meyer himself understood that the scientific objectivity he as-
pired to was the prerogative of an antiquated vision of science, and that
even social studies on modern science understand scientific data as the re-
sult of negotiation and mediation (Latour 1987). As Anderson correctly
points out in the conclusion to his book, “The essence of modern science
– at least in its ideal form – is not the achievement of certainty, but rather
the fact that it openly states the provisionality of its knowledge” (p. 180).
That is why the author invites journalists to humbly sustain a “policy of
doubt” and to refrain from challenging the aberrations of populism with
the presumption of truth, with the risk of being proven wrong when events
turn against the hypotheses they sustain: admitting the provisionality of the
results, while constantly seeking to move forward and delve deeper, will
guarantee credibility and trust.

References
Daston, L. and Galison, P. (2007) Objectivity, Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press.
Drucker, J. (2011) Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, in “Digital Hu-
      manities Quarterly”, 5(1), pp. 1-21.
Friendly, M. (2008) The golden age of Statistical Graphics, in “Statistical Science”,
       23(4), pp. 502-535.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Meyer, P. (1991) The New Precision Journalism, Bloomington, Indiana University
       Press.
Star, S.L. and Bowker, G. (2000) Sorting things out: Classification and its conse-
        quences, Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press.



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