Journalists at the BBC have used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that police are increasingly using data collected using London Underground’s Oyster cards in their investigations.

The RFID-based smartcard tickets have a unique identifier and can be used to track users’ movements. This is very useful for transport management, but also very useful for police investigations. Police have requested data collected by the cards 61 times in January alone, compared with just seven requests in all of 2004.

By following the star of the parade along the route, Lang and Lang’s reporters gave the impression of a mile upon mile of screaming supporters welcoming General Douglas MacArthur to Chicago. Of course, the crowd only cheered as the general drove by, but the people at home saw continuous pandemonium.

Television viewers saw a very different event than those watching the parade in person. Without any intentional bias by the journalists, the medium creates a distorted representation of the live event.

Obvious as this may be to media-savvy people today, this was an important observation five decades ago.

And it’s worth recalling in light of something rather different that happened at another televised parade yesterday, when NBC sanitized a Thanksgiving Day Parade gone wrong.

NBC did not interrupt its broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade yesterday to bring viewers the news that an M&M balloon had crashed into a light pole, injuring two sisters.

n fact, when the time came in the tightly scripted three-hour program for the M&Ms’ appearance, NBC weaved in tape of the balloon crossing the finish line at last year’s parade — even as the damaged balloon itself was being dragged from the accident scene. At 11:47 a.m., as an 11-year-old girl and her 26-year-old sister were being treated for injuries, the parade’s on-air announcers — Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker — kept up their light-hearted repartee from Herald Square, where the parade ends.

Ah, the pursuit of objective truth.

(Until Google gets around to scanning that bit of the library, see Lang and Lang, “The Unique Perspective of Television and Its Effect: a Pilot Study,” American Sociological Review 18(1): 103-112.)

Update: New York Daily News columnist Richard Huff has more background:

The producers of the telecast are from the entertainment wing — not news — and apparently didn’t believe the incident deserved mention.

So there were Lauer and Couric, people accustomed to covering breaking news when all the facts are not known, missing a major story just blocks away.

Couric didn’t learn about the accident until she was off the air, and Lauer apparently found out when he got home.

The situation exposed the perils of having newscasters anchor entertainment events.

The story being picked up across the United States, as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg launched an inquiry into what went wrong with the balloon.

… natural disasters are never wholly natural, because some kinds of people will be more likely to suffer and die than others, depending on how life is organized when the disaster hits. As everyone knows, social order is under severe pressure in New Orleans at the moment, and the media coverage is slowly coming around to analyzing the differential impact of the disaster. The fact that those who have been left behind, or turned into refugees, are disproportionately Africian-American, poor, or elderly is simply impossible to ignore from the media coverage. Seeing pundits and commentators react to these facts is, in a way, a barometer of their sociological imagination—their ability to see the systematic relationship between social structure and individual experience.

Healy, who recently reviewed a book on the sociology of disasters, praises the sociological imagination of conservative columnist David Brooks, whose writings, including this one, often suggest he knows more than a bit about sociology.

Whipple avoids the temptation to write a hand-wringing article about A-level inflation and goes to visit Patrick Baert, a sociologist at his alma mater:

“There is a culture among journalists, a culture of targeting education and mocking education. I find it quite sad, because it is very demoralising for teachers. It is very easy for journalists to target these courses, because very few people have statistical techniques at hand to show whether it is in fact easier.”

He was quick to see the faults in my exercise. “Your experiment kind of ties in with the sensationalist way of dealing with these subjects. What you would need to have done is to take another AS-level in the same time period to make a comparison. You are now 23. You have been through a lot of education. You have maturity, so I suspect you would probably pick up other AS-level subjects quickly as well.”

There is truth in this. I may not have studied humanities for six years, but I am, as the course taught me, a product of the 1988 Education Reform Act, one of the assessed generation. Since starting school I have sat, at a conservative estimate, 60 public exams. I may not be experienced in the arts, but I am experienced in the art of exams.

And here’s the startling bit:

… I have a degree in mathematics: a proper, core subject. I have since struggled to find any everyday applications for vector calculus. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has remained resolutely irrelevant to my normal existence, its use confined solely to the more esoteric of pub quizzes. And yet, in the two months since completing my sociology AS-level, I have repeatedly found it useful.

When I hear news items about the underperformance of boys in exams, I now know that the differences are almost insignificant compared with those between classes. When I hear Hillary Clinton arguing that explicit computer games influence children, I now know that there is a history of research into the negative effects of on-screen sex and violence, most of it inconclusive.

This is not something frivolous — information to provide ammunition for dinner party discussions. For democracy to function, everyone should know these things. Traditional education is very good at teaching us the background to the second world war, and rightly so, but it is far less willing to provide us with the critical tools for living in the modern world.

So is sociology useful and important? Yes. Could I have just turned up off the street and passed the exam from common sense? No. And did my knowledge of revision techniques make a difference? Almost certainly. My experiment, as Baert pointed out, had many flaws.

Nevertheless, Whipple is probably lucky the AS-level exam didn’t include a section on research ethics. Sociology and journalism tend to agree that undercover research should be avoided wherever possible.