ABSTRACT The last decade has seen the meteoric rise of data campaigning as a central concern of political campaigns. This article offers insight into how journalists and political professionals construct practices of data campaigning as all-powerful despite the limited empirical findings to that effect. Specifically, this research delves into how journalistic coverage of campaigns’ use of data and analytics has often relied on inflated accounts of the objectivity of analytics, the belief that more data necessarily means more and better knowledge, and narratives of objective outsiders – notably geeks, hackers, nerds, and scientists – that situate analytics staffers as strange and different, and as uniquely qualified to access the truth. To do this, I engage in critical discourse analysis of popular coverage of data campaigning in the US in the years 2008–2016. Ultimately, denaturalizing these narratives helps reveal how they contribute to defining this “new” campaign strategy as fundamentally concerned with finding objective answers to solvable problems and are key to political professionals’ maintenance of organizational power.

中文翻译：

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数据运营、客观性和局外人：数据运动的新闻报道

摘要 在过去的十年中，数据运动迅速崛起，成为政治运动的核心关注点。本文提供了对记者和政治专业人士如何将数据竞选实践构建为全能的见解，尽管这方面的实证研究结果有限。具体而言，这项研究深入探讨了对竞选活动使用数据和分析的新闻报道如何经常依赖于对分析客观性的夸大描述，相信更多的数据必然意味着更多更好的知识，以及客观局外人的叙述——尤其是极客，黑客、书呆子和科学家——他们认为分析人员既陌生又与众不同，并且具有独特的资格来了解真相。去做这个，我对 2008-2016 年美国数据运动的流行报道进行了批判性话语分析。归根结底，将这些叙事去自然化有助于揭示它们如何有助于定义这种“新”竞选策略，因为它从根本上关注为可解决的问题寻找客观答案，并且是政治专业人士维持组织权力的关键。