Journal Three: Objectivity in Media

Sources:
Interactive: Water testing results
(http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/05/20/lead_water_testing_results.html)
(http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/05/20/water_quality_tests_data_shows_elevated_lead_levels_in_toronto_homes.html)

The entry focuses on a piece from the Toronto Star that uses interactive media to discuss the water testing results for lead contamination in Toronto. The article itself discusses the results and the situation in the city fairly and objectively. It avoids, subjective language.

The imagery in the articles is also well done, with the main photo (a family of three holding glasses of potentially contaminated water) shot head on, instead of using angles to change the viewers perspective (ie. a birds eye view to make them appear to be the little guy/victims in this). Lighting is neutral, dramatic lighting could have been used to make the water, here used for illustrative purpose, seem more threatening. The second photo, of a water pipe in a basement, is more ambiguously threatening given the article’s context and the lack of clarification in the caption. A reader can’t tell if this is an example of a problem pipe and if they should worry about their own similar pipes. The third image, an illustration, shows the divide between what parts of infrastructure the city is responsible for vs. the homeowner. The scale of the image is arbitrary and the choice of making the homeowner’s area of responsibility larger than the city’s is potentially misleading; it could be an attempt to convince the reader that the city is shirking responsibility.

The first interactive element is very well done. It visualizes water testing data gathered between 2008 and 2014. It allows the reader to view a geographic representation of where water tests have passed and failed. Items are scaled arbitrarily based on the number of tests performed, but the proportions are not distorted, so it is informative rather than misleading. Colour choice is also subjective, in this case blue for pass and red for fail. These are loaded colours, with red carrying negative connotations, but are also very conventional choices. Given that failures represent a potential health threat, the choice of red, representing negativity and danger, is a reasonable one. While the plotting can be sorted geographically, it can’t be sorted temporally, meaning there is no way to see if failures are recent of older, or how the data set has changed over time. This can give a misleading impression of the current situation.

The second interactive element visualizes the data based on area code, and drops the blue-red scale for a light-blue to saturated blue. This avoids subjective colour connotations. The red dots on the map represent test pickup locations; here red is used to indicate areas of particular interest. By generalizing the results to area code, a false impression could be given that a homeowner should worry about their water quality when in reality the failures come from  one particular address.
Taking the two interactive maps in the context of each other, I think the different methods of visualizing the date that they’ve employed are informative, rather than misleading.