M4: Question 1: Discussion Forum 4

I'd like to start off saying I love numbers. I often use a phrase I came up with. "Numbers do not lie, people and politicians do." My military nuclear power background has refined my analytical mind and my ability to understand numbers. Obtaining those numbers I need to back up my ideas can sometimes be difficult to obtain and visualize for others to understand. Visualization tools are something I need more work on to understand how to use them and this course pointed me in the right direction to accomplish that. Thank You. 

Anyway, off to the point of the forum post.

"Choose a recently published story that interests you that includes data elements." 

IDK how recent is recent, but here is a story from August of last year:
https://khn.org/news/pharma-cash-rolls-into-congress-to-defend-an-embattled-industry/

"Discuss how the reporter or team used data in the story. Did they use data add context, find characters, hold the government accountable, make the story more interactive, or in some other way?"

In this story, the reporter(s) used the data to contextualize and demonstrate: "The number of big contributions and the lawmakers receiving them signal the industry is building loyalty as voters push candidates to talk about drug prices in the 2020 elections." Obviously, the intent is to hold the government accountable --- or at least transparent. 

While the data "visualizations" are not contained directly in the story, they are linked to inside of it. 

Link to data here: https://khn.org/news/campaign/ 

I use the term visualizations lightly, as it's more of a table layout than actual graphs and maps. The tables, however, are easily read and are separated by subject matter.

I love KHN as a source. They routinely use numbers to back up their stories. The other plus is, the stories are published under a creative commons license. Which means, other sources can republish easily. They often use Datawrapper to present their visualizations. Doing so, allows other news sources to easily embed their visualizations. If you are looking for health-related data, this is one of the best sources I know of.