It ’s well-off to cerebrate of data journalism as a modern invention . With all the hype , a casual reader might assume that it was excogitate sometime during the 2012 presidential military campaign .
Better - inform percipient can push the start date back a few decades , noting with ego - atonement that Philip Meyer did his pioneering employment during the Detroit debauch in the late 1960s . Some go back even further , archly telling the taradiddle of Election Night 1952 , when a UNIVAC data processor used its yard of vacuum tubes to prognosticate the presidential election within four electoral votes .
This storywas to begin with appeared on ProPublica .
But all of these estimates are wrong – in fact , they ’re off by 100 . The veridical story of data point journalism pre - dates newspapers , and traces the history of news itself . The earliest regularly published periodicals of the 17th century , little more than letters home from correspondents hired by international merchant to describe on the line of work particular and the tribunal small talk of faraway city , were datum - deep reports .
Early 18th C newspapers were also productive with data . If it were ever in doubt that the unavoidable facts of human existence are death and taxes , early newspaper publisher published tables of place tax lien and of mortality and its grounds . good prices and the contents of make it ship — cargo and visiting dignitary — were a even and spectacular feature film of newspapers throughout the 18th and nineteenth centuries .
Beyond business organisation figures and population statistics , data was used in a extensive miscellany of contexts . The very first issuance of the Manchester Guardian on May 5 , 1821 hold on the last of its four page a turgid tabular array showing that the real number of bookman in Christian church schools far exceeded the estimation of the educatee universe made by proponent of breeding reform .
Data was also used , as it is today , as both the input to and the turnout of investigative exposés . This is the story of one such fact-finding tale , and of its source , New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley . It ’s a noteworthy fib , and one with significant lessons for “ heavy datum ” journalism today .
Though he ’s no longer a household name , Horace Greeley was one of the most crucial public figures of the 19th 100 . His Tribune had a circulation great than any paper in the metropolis except for transversal - town contender James Gordon Bennett ’s New York Herald . More than 286,000 transcript of the Tribune ’s daily , hebdomadal and semi - hebdomadal editions were sold in the city and across the state by 1860 , which by its own figuring made it the big - circulation paper in the U.S. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed , “ Greeley does the thinking for the whole West at $ 2 per yr for his newspaper publisher . ”
THE MILEAGES OF CONGRESS : Read Greeley ’s original narrative as it appeared in 1848 and see the listing of mileage charged by representatives and senators .
Greeley himself was a popular public loudspeaker and a hugely influential home pattern . He was a bewitching , frustrating , conflicting man . He was a leading abolitionist whose support for the Civil War was limited at best , yet his abolitionist indite in the Tribune made the paper the target of an angry mob during the Draft Riots in 1863 . He was a vegetarian and a utopian socialist who published Karl Marx in the Tribune , but believed fierily in manifest destiny and America ’s western expansion . He was a New York picture who think the city was a terrible influence on working people and encouraged them to “ Go West ” to get away it . Though he was one of the founding father of the Republican Party , his family relationship with Abraham Lincoln was strained , and he ran for President of the United States in 1872 on what add up to the popular ticket , suffer big and go broken - hearted before the Electoral College could meet to certify Grant ’s election .
Historian Richard Kluger mark of the human relationship ,
[ Greeley ] was more utilitarian to [ Seward and Weed ] than they ever proved to him . As the eloquent editor of a rising newspaper that reached , through its hebdomadary variant , throughout the Empire State , Greeley was a zippy fish on the hook , to be fed enough line to thresh about picturesquely until reel in tightly during campaign season .
It was perhaps out of a desire to shut Greeley up — and yet also a recognition of the attention necessary when cope with a man , as The Nation put it , “ with a newsprint at his back ” — that the Whigs nominated Greeley to take a temporary vacancy in the House for the second session of the thirtieth Congress in 1848 . The session would last only three months , and Greeley ’s Congressional career would terminate when the term did . But what Greeley did with his time was singular .
By the heart of the 1800s , Congressmen ’s compensation for travel to and from their district had been an unsuccessful but simmering reform object for year . The law provided for a 40 - penny per - land mile mileage reimbursement , and compute the distance “ by the usually travelled route . ” after shoot his posterior , Greeley get a look at the schedule lean every congresswoman ’s mileage and was shocked by the aggregate . To Greeley , the expense were a wasteful token of an earliest time , when travel to and from the far - flung reaches of the United States would have been a costly , bruising amour . The 40 - cent mileage had been calculated decade earlier to match a pre-1816 congressman ’s pay charge per unit of $ 8 a day , take he could travel a mere 20 mile per day . However , thanks to steamship and the increase prevalence of gear , travelers could go far faster than that .
Greeley visit it as an outrageous waste product of the taxpayer ’s money , and deployed his paper to correct that wrong . “ If the route ordinarily journey from California to Washington is around Cape Horn — or the member from that embryo Department of State shall choose to think it is — they will each be entitled to charge some $ 12,000 Mileage per session consequently . ”
Rather than just opining against it , he conceived and print a data point - journalism project that , in form if not in execution , would be very much at home in a newsroom today . He asked one of his reporters , Douglas Howard , a former postal shop assistant , to practice a U.S. Post Office book of mail routes to reckon the short itinerary from each congressman ’s district to the Capitol , and compare those distances with each congresswoman ’s fuel consumption rate reimbursements . On Dec. 22 , 1848 , with Greeley now at the same time its editor program and a brand unexampled congressman from New York , the Tribune published a story and a table in two column of agate type . The table listed each congresswoman by name with the gasoline mileage he received , the gas mileage the postal itinerary would have granted him and the difference in cost between them . “ Let no man jump at the last that this overindulgence has been charged and received contrary to law , ” wrote Greeley in the accompanying schoolbook . “ The fact is otherwise . The members are all honorable men — if any irrelevant infidel should doubt it , we can silence him by referring to the prefix to their name in the newspapers . ”
It was n’t his colleagues Greeley inveighed against , but rather , he claim , the system . ”We assume that each has charged exactly what the law allow him and thereupon we compact home the question — ‘ Ought not THAT LAW to be amended ? ' ”
Among the accused stand Abraham Lincoln , in his only terminal figure as congresswoman . Lincoln ’s change of location from faraway Springfield , Illinois , made him the recipient role of some $ 677 in supererogatory mileage — more than $ 18,700 today — among the House ’s worst . Beside Lincoln , Greeley ’s findings let in a lean of historical legends , including both of Lincoln ’s vice President — Hannibal Hamlin , who take only an extra $ 64.80 to go between Washington and Maine , and Andrew Johnson , who got $ 122.40 special to get to the Capitol and back from Tennessee . Daniel Webster get $ 72 extra for travelling to and from the Senate from Massachusetts . John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were recipient role of an extra $ 313.60 and $ 736.80 , severally , for round - misstep travelling from South Carolina and Mississippi . The excesses tracked rough according to distance from Washington . Isaac Morse , a Democrat from Louisiana whose journey incorporate some 1,200 mile by postal route , received 2,600 geographical mile in gas mileage from the House . A helpful if imprecise note , I accept written by Greeley , offer up : “ Only 409 miles less than to London . ”
News Travels Relatively Fast
It pack about five 24-hour interval for the story to locomote from New York to the repose of the country . One peculiarly laudatory Greeley biographer reported that “ the effect of [ the mileage disclose ] upon the Ithiel Town was immediate and immense . It vaporize upon the wings of the country press , and became , in a few day , the talk of the nation . ” On Dec. 27 , the story break slack in the House . The Congressional Globe recorded the eruption on the floor . Ohio Democratic Rep. William Sawyer ( $ 281.60 in excess charges ) raise a point of order , accusing Greeley of “ a coinage of demagoguism of which he could never consent to be shamefaced while he take a seat on this flooring , or while he made any pretension to stand as an respectable man among his component . ”
A heated central follow with nearly all speakers stand against Greeley , led by Sawyer and Thomas J. Turner , D.-Ill . ( $ 998.40 ) . Most of the charges , according to Turner , were “ absolutely false : ”
[ Greeley ] had either been actuated by the low , groveling , base , and malignant desire to represent the Congress of the nation in a false and embarrassing light before the country and the world , or that he had been actuated by motives still more bag — by the desire of acquiring an ephemeral notoriety , by blazoning forward to the world what the writer attempted to show was fraudulence . The whole article abounded in gross error and willfully false command , and was evidently prompted by motives as base of operations , unprincipled , and tainted as ever actuated an somebody in wield his pen for the public insistency .
While the conversation was rich with florid dudgeon , some of the arguments against Greeley appeared more meaty . Turner pointed out that the Postmaster General had stopped using the postal route book Greeley used to cipher mileage “ in effect of wrongness . ” Greeley forestall that the article acknowledge this — though I found no passage indicating this in the Tribune . Others noted that the Mileage Committee severally determined mileage for each fellow member based both on evidence provided by the appendage as well as on their own research , and that members themselves did n’t “ charge ” anything .
To Greeley , this was all beside the point . He defended his storey on the floor , pointing out that he did n’t charge members with anything fraudulent or illegal nor did he “ object to any gentleman ’s taking that course if he saw fit ; but was that the path upon which the milage ought to be computed ? ”
Greeley ’s own mileage is not list in the board , but he separately told the House that he ’d found that his own milage was overvalue by some $ 4 – which would match the mileage pay to his predecessor – and that he ’d slump the matter with the House Sergeant - at - arm . If opinion among his House workfellow ranged from annoyed to apoplectic , belief among America ’s newspapers seem to have been largely supportive of Greeley . “ The election of Mr. Greeley to the House seems likely to produce good , ” ran an column in the New York Evening Post the next week . “ He has already rendered the people an important service by expose the fallacious manner of depend and pay mileage . ” The Eastern Carolina Republican anathemize Greeley with faint praise , tell that he ’d “ had make upon a practical reform for once in his life history . ”
Greeley had “ pose down the surplus to their honor , ” added the Sandusky ( Ohio ) Clarion . “ This was not altogether a judicious move , for Mr. Greeley , as a member of this House , especially consider how extravagantly nice some of these bloated cribbage - suckers are about honor . ”
“ I had expected that it would sound off up some dust , ” Greeley later wrote in his autobiography , “ but my anticipation were far outrun . ” He phone the affair the “ mileage cheat , ” and pronounce the extremity “ wounded pigeons ” and their excuses a “ shabby dodge . ”
A few weeks into the scandal , he drop a line in the Tribune :
Members who have taken long Mileage broadly speaking had nothing to do with settling the aloofness ; while the Committee say they applied to the penis broadly , and fail a answer , did the best they could . That onetime rascal Nobody is again at his antic ! He ought to be indicted . ”
Lessons Learned
Though it ’s 166 year honest-to-goodness and largely forgotten , Greeley ’s mileage story has resonance — and lessons — for data journalist today :
First , heart-to-heart record are of import for journalists , and they ’re absolutely essential for data diarist . Greeley was able-bodied to utilise his condition as a sitting representative to get access to the information for the story , “ certifying that it was wanted as the fundament of action at law in the House . ” But a law granting memory access to government activity text file was n’t put in plaza until the Freedom of Information Act was signed almost 100 eld after Greeley ’s death . Notably , Congress has exempted itself from FOIA . While it is n’t perfect , journalists and researchers today can count on getting data from the politics much more easily than they could in Greeley ’s sidereal day .
secondly , data diarist must be cautious about the powerful story raw information can tell on its own . Greeley might have known he was being provocative by publishing the name as he did , and his protestations that “ there was no imputation in the article upon any phallus , that he had made illegal commission ” seem a moment implausible . Indeed , the write up Greeley wrote accompanying the long tabular array insists that the prey of his investigation was the outdated natural law and not any particular representative . But that ’s neither how it was accept in the House nor in the country .
Then , as now , stark naked data is n’t raw . It come with biases and reflects the choices made about the methods used to create and break down it . It can also tell its own write up and mislead the great unwashed into inferring things that the facts do n’t support . As journalist , we must understand and make conscious , fair choices about what we ’re doing when we put epithet next to numbers . And we must at all gunpoint give linguistic context — not just in an connected story , but located near the data itself . Greeley made an tilt in the form of a statistical tabular array and people across the land — even sophisticated newspaper opinion writers — concluded that the Congress was on the take . The number can speak for themselves , but it is n’t always clear what they ’re saying .
Also , it ’s just as important for datum diarist to support their stories with actual man as it is for traditional reporters to do so . Telephones had n’t been invented yet when Greeley published the story , but it does n’t seem as if Greeley tried contacting the Committee on Mileage to verify his methodology was sound . Critics on the trading floor of the House bring out flaws in Greeley ’s story that would have been devastating in today ’s environment of instantaneous social - internet medium critique . Greeley should also have pass out to congressman he singled out to give them a chance to respond pre - publication . “ In display case the design of the writer had been to play somewhat in the matter , ” asked Rep. Sawyer , “ why he had not taken the trouble to ascertain the fact ? ”
The board impress in the Tribune is rife with misspelled names , arithmetic errors , a missing entry and what must have been typographical errors introduced when typesetting the complex columns of turn . Greeley and his joint author release a series of corrections and elucidation over the next few month . Howard later address the errors inevitable “ in a computation involving over half a million of figures , and execute in a very brief space of time . ” But with modern computer science supporting us , data journalist today have a far in high spirits taproom for accuracy . Bulletproofing is a decisive part of the editorial process of any data point story and it must never be skip .
All that said , Greeley ’s work had its mean core . The House continued to squawk about the story but passed a bill that seance by a vote of 158 to 16 to change the reckoning of gas mileage to “ the shortest uninterrupted mail road ” — though , Greeley later on write , with “ a distinct discernment that the Senate would down it . ” In his autobiography Greeley reported that Congress later lowered the per - knot rate to twenty cents , and though the “ commonly travelled route ” language stay on , he conjecture that the cattle farm of the railroad line cut that route to something comparatively reasonable .
It is perhaps a fitting coda to this story that , although transportation has gotten faster and prosperous than Greeley could have conceive of , congressional gas mileage calculation remain , though in quite different form . Unlike in 1848 , when member of Congress were in person pay the gasoline mileage requital , district travel funds are now part of each phallus ’s overall disbursement budget . They ’re depend using a per - mi rate that increases with proximity to D.C. The high rate , which would have applied to Greeley ’s Manhattan territorial dominion , is 96 centime , more than double the charge per unit in Greeley ’s daylight .
This storywas previously published by ProPublica . It was primitively prepared for the March 2014 league , “ Big Data Future , ” at Ohio State ’s Moritz College of Law , and will be put out in I / S : A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society , 10:2 ( 2015 ) . For more selective information , seehttp://bigdatafuture.org .
Abraham LincolnDataHistory
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