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Better Data

by Joe Karaganis — last modified 2009-07-07 15:42

 

Good media and communications policy requires good data about services, audiences, industry structure, programming, and a host of other issues. Of equal importance, it requires widespread access to that data, so that policymaking can be informed and evaluated by serious analysis and peer review. The current policymaking environment frequently fails on both conditions: 1) data collection is haphazard and increasingly inadequate for describing the emerging digital public sphere; and 2) data collection is heavily privatized and priced at levels that exclude independent researchers, public interest groups, and policymakers. This is a recipe for poor public policy.

Researchers--and the SSRC Collaborative Grants project--run into these problems routinely. Several grants deal explicitly with access to data and data integrity. Several focus on the creation of new metrics and datasets that can better describe the media environment and public interest within it. Still others treat data collection and analysis as an avenue of community engagement with the media.

These investments also support a wider program investment in documenting data needs, improving data collection, and expanding access to data.

 

Reinventing the Public Role in Data Collection

Policy Accountability

 


Counting the Undercounted

 

Data as a Condition of Participation

 
Voices

In the halls of policymaking, this is where we got killed. Our failure to get traction again and again -- our failure to have the desired effect on policy -- was because we didn't have the data. Unfortunately, the other side has, not good or valid data, but data. Policymakers accept any data over no data.

-- Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law, American University


We have witnessed years and years of broadband policy built on data that all honest observers acknowledge was rubbish. The FCC has finally joined this consensus.

-- Ben Scott, Free Press


When the NSFnet backbone was privatized in 1995, the network science community lost access to the only set of publicly available statistics on a national Internet backbone network.  This transition essentially eliminated the opportunity to conduct analyses on a widely-used backbone.  Today, far from having an analytic handle on the Internet, network researchers often lack the ability to measure traffic at the granularity necessary to make increasingly critical infrastructure improvements.  The scientific community is unable to identify potential congestion points. Legislators operate in enforced ignorance of potential security problems. Key decision-makers are effecitvely clueless about how the Internet can be improved

-- Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation


SSRC funding enabled a community-academic partnership that raised the profile of media monitoring on the research agenda of the university’s government department and allowed a small media reform organization to expand its profile with its community media outlets. This is especially true knowing broadcast news media in California are seldom, if ever, the regular subject of research study.

-- JoAnn Fuller, Sacramento Media Group, California Common Cause