Lunch and Learn: Ira Chinoy on "Predicting the Winner"

Lunch and Learn, a partnership between the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System, returns with special guest Ira Chinoy author of "Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting," in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System.

"The history of American elections changed profoundly on the night of November 4, 1952. An out-of-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 2020-2021 and for future election nights in the United States. -provided by the publisher.   

Click here to watch this event live - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_-sN0zyVDs

Ira Chinoy is the author of "Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting," to be published by Potomac Books on May 1, 2024. This book explores the contentious history of election nights as important venues in American culture for rolling out new tools for journalism - which have been met with both excitement and ridicule - and it addresses the way forward from the events of election night 2020 and the drama that followed.

Chinoy has 24 years of experience as a journalist at four newspapers: The Washington Post, The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, The Lawrence (Massachusetts) Eagle-Tribune and The Pine Bluff (Arkansas) Commercial.

At The Washington Post, Chinoy was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a 1998 series on the use of deadly force by the D.C. police. At The Providence Journal, Chinoy was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for coverage of corruption and patronage in the Rhode Island courts.

Since 2001, Chinoy has been on the faculty of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism teaching courses in the practice and history of journalism. He is the cofounder of the Future of Information Alliance, created at Maryland to foster transdisciplinary dialog, research, and action on pressing information-related issues.

Chinoy graduated with honors from Harvard College in 1977. In 2010, he completed his Ph.D. in Journalism Studies at Maryland with a dissertation titled “Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age.” It won the annual dissertation prize by the American Journalism Historians Association.

In 2021 and 2023, Chinoy was awarded the Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication History Division. In 2021 he also received the National Award for Excellence in Teaching from the American Journalism Historians Association.