Andy Sundberg, a member of the executive committee of Americans Citizens Abroad, has just sent two articles that illustrate what  happens when you stir the same information with two points of view: you’re served up two very different stories. In this case the basic information is about how the names of 53 people, activists against the death penalty or the Iraq war, ended up on US federal and state lists of terrorists thanks to a police surveillance operation in Maryland. The Washington Post handled the story one way; the Maryland Daily Record wrote it up another way.

Buried down in the Post‘s story is a telling line, a word of caution to anyone who thinks it’s cheaper to take a shortcut when building a database. “Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.”

How much would it have cost them to add a new field called non-terrorist activists? This overlooks the question, of course, of whether or not the information should even be gathered.

Go for that extra database field; don’t spare the expense!

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