Complete Story
09/26/2018
Data journalism and the law
From The Columbia Journalism Review
In 1961, legal scholar Alexander Meiklejohn famously wrote that the rationale for the First Amendment depended on citizens’ ability to receive and use information relevant to democratic self-governance. The crux of his statement was this: knowledge is power.
Fifteen years later, scholar Thomas Emerson would rely on Meiklejohn’s work to famously highlight the “vital importance in a democratic society of the right to know.” In his article, he explained how James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, asserted that “[a] popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.” From there, Emerson continued, “A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.”
In view of this, asserting access to information seems paramount to self-governance. Every day reporters try to fulfill this duty through various mechanisms. But in our current environment, they are often competing with an unparalleled glut of information that readers absorb from the moment they wake up to the moment they power down their devices at night. One study by Northeastern University estimated that the size of the “digital universe” of data was 4.4 zettabytes in 2013—and is scheduled to jump to 44 zettabytes by 2020. According to a Forbes magazine piece in 2015, “More data ha[d] been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.”
