# Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting - Hardcover

by **Ira Chinoy** (Author)

The history of American elections changed profoundly on the night of November 4, 1952. An outside-the-box approach to predicting winners from early returns with new tools--computers--was launched live and untested on the newest medium for news: television. Like exhibits in a freak show, computers were referred to as "electronic brains" and "mechanical monsters."

Yet this innovation would help fuel an obsession with numbers as a way of understanding and shaping politics. It would engender controversy down to our own time. And it would herald a future in which the public square would go digital. The gamble was fueled by a crisis of credibility stemming from faulty election-night forecasts four years earlier, in 1948, combined with a lackluster presentation of returns. What transpired in 1952 is a complex tale of responses to innovation, which Ira Chinoy makes understandable via a surprising history of election nights as venues for rolling out new technologies, refining methods of prediction, and providing opportunities for news organizations to shine.

In _Predicting the Winner_ Chinoy tells in detail for the first time the story of the 1952 election night--a night with continuing implications for the way forward from the dramatic events of 2020-21 and for future election nights in the United States.  

### Author Biography

**Ira Chinoy** is an associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he founded and directs the Future of Information Alliance. He is a former investigative reporter for the _Washington Post_, where he also served as director of computer-assisted reporting. Chinoy was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting and has won the George Polk Award and other top journalism awards.  

**Number of Pages:** 384

**Dimensions:** 1.4 x 9 x 6.38 IN

**Publication Date:** May 01, 2024

## Details

- **Price:** 38.95 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 38.95 USD | In stock |

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- Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting - Hardcover

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