Lost Federal Data Means Found Opportunities for Journalism
Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces. This week’s edition is being published a day early because of travel plans.
You may think of Elon Musk as something of a data geek, but this week I want to talk about implications for journalism of the nihilistic devastation of government data by Musk and his tech bros across a range of policy areas. In the ensuing wanton destruction, I actually see two sets of intriguing possibilities, one on the news side, one a set of potential business opportunities.
Let’s begin with what Musk is hiding from public view and where he is discontinuing data collection. The losses range across domestic and international public health, but also include environmental (including weather) and educational data. A column last week by Alec MacGillis of ProPublica provides some powerful illustrations of what is being lost.
Consider the motives
Why are Trump and Musk doing this? The answers seem to include weaponized political correctness (it’s harder to talk about what you can’t count, and they don’t, for instance, want anyone to talk about race discrimination or gender issues, past or present) as well as a primal, punitive urge against agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for International Development and even the Department of Education.
But there are two other motivations that I don’t think have received enough attention, and that’s where the opportunities for journalism arise. The first is simply a desire to suppress potential bad news, or even news they just don’t want the public to know. Examples? The likely undercount of measles cases in this country or the future impact of having defunded HIV treatment in many places around the world.
Who knows if the ambition for stifling data collection, once they really get going, may extend to addressing possible rising inflation and unemployment as a result of Trump policies by simply not reporting the data, or manipulating it to undercount the impact. If you think that’s far-fetched, I hope you’ll acknowledge how much your sense of such things has changed in the last 13 weeks, and perhaps extend your imagination.
Reporting it out
For reporters, the opportunities here should be clear, and I think they deserve much more attention than they’ve received. If we are appreciably under-counting measles cases, is that happening accidentally, because of limitations in the system, or perhaps with malice aforethought? Is the elimination of educational attainment data at the same time as we are cutting federal aid to local school systems just a coincidence, or is it part of a plan to obscure the later effects of the cutbacks on how much our children learn? Are signs beginning to emerge of pressure on those who compile the federal data still being collected to trim or alter results? Have we developed sources who would tell us if there was?
The second under-appreciated motivation for eliminating federal data collection, I think, may be a desire, or even in some cases a nascent plan, to later privatize its provision, likely employing the crony capitalism that is becoming a hallmark of the regime.
Filling some of the gaps
Here’s where the business opportunity for journalism could arise. While Musk may have it in mind that he and his acolytes can be the ones launching the replacement private data enterprises, newsrooms actually have something of a comparative advantage in this area. They have experience in gathering data from disparate sources (in cases where the federal government was cumulating information from states and localities, that will be the key task), and have already often proven more capable than government in creating usable interfaces for valuable information.
To be sure, more attention to the havoc being wrought, and even filling some of the gaps that are being created, will only do so much. There have been a number of heroic efforts, at universities and elsewhere, to archive historical data before Musk takes it offline, but these are necessarily backward-looking, even if valuable for scholarship and some journalism.
Looking forward, better data, for instance, cannot make vaccines available, but it can show where they are needed. Pulling back the curtain on how information is being suppressed and perhaps manipulated cannot restore the trust in government data that is being destroyed, but it may somewhat deter more damage. It is even possible that some news organizations will be able to make progress on the elusive goal of revenue diversification because of this governmental retreat, a genuine instance of lemonade from lemons.
Most important, I am confident that, on both the news and business sides, responding promptly, innovatively and effectively to this latest challenge will well serve our readers, listeners and viewers, particularly at a time their leaders are serving them so poorly.
Thanks for reading Second Rough Draft! Subscribe for free.