’A Blue Island in a Sea of Red,’ or, the Power of Images
- Posted by Bernhard Debatin in Dr. D’s HTC blog on 11/15/2008
- tags: HTC, news, online
During and after the elections, we’ve seen a lot of maps, and most often, they looked like this:
- or like this:
.
And for those, who did not get it from the picture, the title at the bottom reads: Athens County a blue island in a sea of red.
What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s put it this way: If you’d write the premises of this picture as an argument in a text, it would be called a faulty argument, a fallacy. Because you’d state that it is ok to represent the amount of elements in a given space by the size of this space, even though the size of the space has nothing to do with the amount of elements in it.
Complicated? Well, what it means is that we’ve become accustomed to accept a geographic representation of population numbers. If you look at an electoral map of Ohio or the US, you would think that it is almost impossible that the Democrats won the elections. Sure, we all know that population density matters. But the manifest message of all these territorial maps is different.
This is why some people have created population cartograms, in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population.
The site techpresident.com has a cool flash animated electoral map that morphes from territorial representation to an accurate electoral vote representation, which at the end looks like this:
.
(watch the animation here)
Mark Newman, a physicist from the University of Michigan, created an even cooler set of cartograms, which keep the overall landmass intact while representing the actual popular and electoral college votes. The popular vote map, for instance, looks like this:
Check out his cartograms at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/.
Why is this important? Because it’s a good example for how a particular perspective--in this case geo-territorial representation--creates an implicit argument, and with it: media bias.
permalink
What Does Journalism Have to Do with the Financial Crisis?
- Posted by Bernhard Debatin in Dr. D’s HTC blog on 10/2/2008
- tags: business, HTC, news
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what journalists have to say about the financial crisis. Good economic reporting is rare, but not unheard of.
I love good narrative journalism and one of the best is "This American Life" on NPR. The most fascinating story I heard recently is Another Frightening Show About the Economy, which is not yet available for download, but an abbreviated version is available as
"The Week America’s Economy Almost Died"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95099470
NPR, All Things Considered, September 26, 2008
An excellent explanation of the crisis and a great example for good journalism.
Here are some more pieces that I found both impressive and helpful:
1. Bailout Clash: 200 Economists Vs. The Senate
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95224933
NPR, Planet Money, October 1, 2008
2. Global Pool of Money Got Too Hungry
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90327686
NPR, All Things Considered, May 9, 2008
3. Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23krona.html
NYT, September 22, 2008
4. Why Bail? The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger
By Dean Baker - September 29, 2008, 6:09AM
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/29/why_bail/
Dean Baker also has a very interesting blog on economic reporting
Beat the Press
