the libyan riot police have fired tear gas to break a funeral procession in la paz thousands of people took part in the march that began in the city of el alto to coincide with a debate in congress and we're going to hold new elections libya's interim government hoping that elections will help defuse street violence that's killed at least 32 people since october. trying his newly elected president got a bio rajapaksa sworn in his brother mahinda rajapakse as the new prime minister the 1st time in the country's history the 2 siblings have held both top political positions and the new president has not pointed his brother mahinda as the interim government's new finance minister but those are the headlines at the news continues here on al-jazeera after whose truth is it in the way of the actual watching. i believe. the prime minister to issue is to the british on the 31st the job of making this country the greatest place on earth britain's

departure is delayed. follow the drama of bricks it on al-jazeera. to. my name is mona taliban and i'm a day to journalist my job is to find numbers in all sorts of different places and then turn them into images that people will understand and connect to. i always try to think of ways to connect the subject matter with the visualisation itself so that people can automatically see what the data visualisation is all about. if it's

about me copies being fined in france outdrawn a copy and if it's about the k.k.k. i will draw a k.k.k. hood it is about sleep odors sleepy face is about the greek economy taking a dive then i'm going to draw a diver i hope that by creating handle illustrations it doesn't alienate people it doesn't make people feel like i'm not smart enough to understand this which is a big problem with i would say traditional dates jonathan. when i create an illustration i don't just assume that because i understand other people understand and i share that illustration with people who don't work in my field whatsoever about you know my mom sometimes and also whether or not i get it and that really really. and very often their responses make sense to me and then i have to go back to square one. i think one of the things that has informed my work is that. it's because the language in the way that it was written so

inaccessible and i think that's one of the things that interests me about numbers and the idea of. language which is more accessible of people. i think. and i think part of the success of far right news outlets is speaking a different language even if it's a language of misinformation and even if it's a language that is not grounded in fact. which is not passion i think it speaks to people in our language and that's incredibly effective. i've been crying illustrations i mean. i've been doing this now for 5 years. 5 years and. i kind of known how to do the 100 when i know how to scan

stuff and i know how to color it i have no idea how to paint and i thought i would give it a try it's just quite. a big 1st try. this study came out earlier. about representation although to me kind of quantified the lack of diversity in a really really spectacular way so they. the museum collections of 18 major u.s. museums and they found that 75 percent of all of that in those museum collections was made by whites and so in the foreground of this painting or $100.00 figures and 75 of them were. so in the background there are $189.00 additional figures and there are women and people of color that need to be added to the art scene for it actually represent the population as a whole. the title of the work is called who you hate to see. them and your question is really relevant. i worry that without evidence and

data sometimes there's too much of an emphasis on the individual right so one person saying one thing and then one person saying something else and i think one of the powerful things about dates is the end laus you to focus on the issue rather than the individual and that can potentially be quite empowering. in addition to this painting which uses us states where we wanted to do something about u.k. our space is so there are $3416.00 artists in the tapes permanent collection as of the last time that they publish their data and over the you 3416 just 521 a women and so my 1st date after after analyzing all of that was to create this which is kind of simple and on the horizontal axis is the year that the artist was born and then the y. axis the percentage of all of those artists that were men or women and what you see over time is that there is some progress so if we had equality right they would

just be a horizontal line through this and you would just see 50 percent men and 50 percent women at any given year. and the idea of doing the trip right thing is it shows that men are kind of encroaching on women's bias or like women's territory. yeah so i'm going to try and do it for a painting. i get mine it's a different place is the kind of fall into a broad categories really one is responding to things that are happening in the news so being part of an existing conversation that's already happening. lived experience can often affect which stories from the news i perceive as being worth taking on so it's been to palestine of bins it's well and i felt like what i saw they didn't necessarily was and they certainly were selected in the news coverage so i was reading and i feel like it's a topic that could potentially lend itself well to good day to journalism and so

that's something i might take on that is again informed by my own personal experiences. i think we should have injuries i think we should have done since and . the other one is kind of starting a new conversation so i ask people to send me ideas that they have about things that really matter to them so i'm often checking my d.m. my e-mail and just looking at the things that people care about and verify it comes from there were in present experience by soviet like a schoolteacher from one part america where the public school system is being defunded that i'm not aware of and those are questions that might on a surly comes to me because they're not part of my lived experience but i think that they really important questions. to i misspoke 5 years ago and i'm still just a mother that from muslim women in that country in terms of my paperwork and it was

just a really really scary time. and i don't think it's any scary time. there is a great sense of islam 5 here in america right now and one of the narratives about that is that muslims post security threats to the country just it's just it's the data suggests differently date suggest actually white terrorism is the biggest threat to america at the moment that gun those are huge start to american public safety and so i often think about the areas of misinformation that people have and some of them but attempts to directly address that.

i think it's often the most probable quips and society that are affected by fake news whether it's muslims in america are refugees are being portrayed as like benefit cheats and wanting to come here just to steal money get really really finds me but really frightens me.

the. minute a. song lists the oldest oldest or the. it's just a lot. you wish way basically the power to live is that because i was this is when i 1st started working i was just illustrating them and photographing them and posting them as it is but my later work like this is about this was for thanksgiving it was about the number of babies are born relative to the number of hurricanes but like as an illustration it doesn't on the moon it doesn't really make sense as a chart and so i think that's one of the evolutions of people see of like charts that make sense and then charts they eventually don't you know i mean like i want to figure out the spacing of it a little bit yeah we should try and yes and then it starts flashing. part of the purpose of creating a 100 illustrations is i want people to look at and question the illustration they see in front of them because the truth is that there is

a high degree of imprecision in in data right there is something to be said for that and understand that for every statistically you see the truth lies somewhere within the parameters around that number 2 is funny i think even this one right here which did really really well this is one of the like more successful ones i think this one i got the number slightly wrong so it's photo shopped in the final version so i like the bars a little bit so i don't know if that affects the value of it is actually just like brought those you're processing that you like double checking numbers over here. and honestly getting it wrong the time i feel like it's important to be transparent about that. yeah i think so. much to do one of the best things about doing the dates journalism i do is that i will publish. or deaths from aids and i will show you george bush kind of presiding

over this period and in all of the comments will be people that will be talking about all the factors that contributed to the rise of aids beyond the government kind of turning a blind eye to it and so readers a concert make holding me accountable and saying these are the things that you're going right and these are things that you're getting wrong and the smaller your readership the fewer people are able to hold you to account i want to reach a really big group of people partly because i want to get it right and i don't know if you listen so really get it right with more in an echo chamber and speaking to him in. i think pushed back a little bit of the idea that frankness is something new there's always been misinformation there's always been deliberate misinformation i think the word fake news implies intention and i think there are a lot of journalists who are trying to do a good job who are contributing to that look at the coverage of the u.s. election and the response was we didn't get it wrong the public misunderstood.

and i think the part the reason why there is so much misunderstanding about that is because germans on thank you there's an 80 percent chance this person when they are saying gee there's an 84.9 percent chance and that is complete misinformation they are selling you a lie about the precision of their work we don't know the weather to that degree of accuracy we don't know election outcomes to that degree of accuracy so if the public didn't understand you filed and you need to hold up your hands and say we got it wrong and there was just an unwillingness to do that that was really frightening to me when i was hired by the guardian we had a conversation are we going to cover the u.s. election by making a prediction and i thought very very very strongly that the role of data journalism is not to forecast people's behavior is to understand the now is to use the past and the present to be able to inform people so that they can make informed decisions themselves about how they want to vote it's not to tell them this is what you will do before you do it and said we spend the entire election right now column

skeptical polling where we would talk about why polling and its limitations and might miss some of me correct and i'm proud of the fact that we did. i think people can often conflate polling with data journalism. it actually comes to be such an intense part of state's journalism which which worries me it worries me even when it's not about forecasting people's behaviors because i think polling is fundamentally flawed i think using a 1000 people to represent a population of 320000000 people isn't a good idea it's just fundamentally imprecise. i think even if you're not necessarily even an interest in the east like dates or fix every part of your life right you don't have access to good dates are you able to greater importance a business why should be tallied and so informing people how they can go out and

collect the numbers themselves that are relevant to their lives or they can be their own advocates is really really important and i think that that perspective is massively advance by my background in enjoying where other people were campaigning for a book iraqi refugees and i.d.p.'s me to it and actually those iraqi refugees and internally displaced people should have been in the room speak for themselves rather than speak every. day selling international security the goal is to go into enjoying the united nations i worked means national organization migrations iraq office and i was looking at statistics about what people in the country needed but later when i went last time with you was it was not the place that i left the toll it was completely different not always safe there then but it was. better

there's not much they wanted but we took one car journey where we going to the car from him way with the in then we went to have some kind of meeting or something and then by the time. of the same building and the building had been completely bomb. you know you can bomb 10 minutes off of the with here all of the headlines about all of the migrants crossing by the water and then we told me that one of our house . yes he nearly lost his life i think it was horrific where he went through this is why ok. so i went to iraq and i think i took the photographs on my 1st ever visit to the country i'd never been before and it was my mum's 1st time of returning to the country since she left in her twenty's and so it was just very very bizarre to see this place that like was always. an imagined place was imagined it was just kind of

present in our household but not present in our household and yeah i guess taking photographs was a really important way of making it feel real because it was quite surreal to be there and then what i did which i did recently altered the photographs to show statistics about the country. so one of the issues with traditional dates journalism charts is that you don't see any humanity and you don't see any people it just feels so. cold and so one of them takes visualizations i did based on iraq was showing how life expectancy has changed over time and literally took a photograph of my mom standing in the garden of the house that she grew up in and digitally altered it's just a high as life expectancy in iraq has changed because i didn't want someone to see a bomb that's bigger and then see a pilot smaller and think ok so iraqis live a few years less i want them to see a woman and know that

a shorter life expectancy means a few years of her living with her family it means. it means few years of her being able to support her family is a real person. and i still think that using photography into its journalism could be a really powerful way to do it i really really in that process looking back at the photographs and i think they're really terrible but you know it's my 1st step in creating this kind of a thing. that is a great tiger. i would be proud of that tiger today yeah i'm going to take a vote that's how tiger should be drawn as an inspiration. 63 job in my. 60. 3 christmas signing. return. 29.

next extinction. once you're ready to start if you can type in this you are out. sign this this is a really really simple spreadsheet in some ways and less important ways is about the titanic it's like from the passenger list of everyone on the titanic and very often when i'm like especially ones i create by large institutions the columns at the top seem to make no sense they're just like a weird series of letters and numbers and that's because somewhere else on the internet is a code book that you have to use to kind of decipher some of these things so it's really important if you try to find a code book that can help you to decipher what those numbers may. be.

so i think a lot of people feel healthy skepticism when it comes to numbers that. they don't necessarily feel empowered to understand how to take apart that number they just think ok i have to trust it or not trust it and that's my kind of middle path and i think that's a really really bad way to work so i not only want people to understand how i reach my conclusions i also want them to feel empowered to repeat those steps for other pieces of information so if i showing them how i can fact check a kind of politician has made a name when they hear another claim are able to repeat those steps and check out for themselves and i always think like one of the things that's so exciting about data is that you are able to be very transparent in ways that you might not be for other types of journalism so investigative journalism sometimes you just. obviously always always are going to sources of data. so now straight away we're starting to see a story the probability of surviving is much higher in 1st class compared to that

class compared to. just age but now just just just to think yeah yeah ok great let's think do gooding it's good it's good to experiment you know i mean about the labels on things that it's like i mean accusing me and. a lot of. anyway but it's quite easy to like go in and try to think like that that's really cool i thought i just took you through a few different like charging techniques this is small multiples i love small schools and i feel like it's something that you guys can think about so this was something about cases of measles and again look each each one of these babies is a year i could have just as easily had a pipe shop i saw i want to show a baby this is more fun of it is covered in sports but also allows you to kind of like my device is this idea again of my ring the subjects with the thing. it's interesting to me as well how when play younger i think they have quite a good relationship with math because they are able to understand how they reached the final number right part of the way that people suddenly become disenchanted

with mass is that it doesn't make sense anymore you're not able to follow those steps and with good data journalism it's literally a case of saying this is the number of crimes that were committed this is the population and this is how it calculated the right and people can repeat those steps for themselves and see exactly how you reach a conclusion and that's really empowering it shows brita is that you're on the same level playing field if i can do it you can do it too which is a really great message to have in journalism. in the right place and.

i am sure the field skeptical about most of the data sets i see because in every single case i'm not in that date set. arabs are not on any data sets by and large that are collected in america so i have always perceived myself of the other and i don't see myself in the states and even in these times i spend 4 months creating arabs are the other and i think that informs your whole outlook on the world when view are in that dataset and it makes me fundamentally skeptical any makes me fundamentally concerned about collecting more accurate and better information about the world around us. i just want to say actually coming back to the senate race a man when asked thank you for watching tracker it's not just right i'm speaking of our nation's history that's next he now i know i'm. i think

really ever describe myself as honest and henry insisted on doing things only to press on with these illustrations i saw how big this works and what is this isn't even one of them i think it will come through using that word which is in support of this 96 which is who gets to kind of put themselves on to in and start our space yes i drink because of the really miserable joke i hate it when i felt like i was really respected and i'm actually just started during the week just to kind of stay sane and nice and sanity and you know tracy. when you're struggling to find out what the truth is it's really helpful to have somebody like mine as well because just based in like spreadsheets and day just tell you that she has cable and there's a way to isn't that much power and i think she's when he said he had communicate with people they choose that generally get left out today just.

the fact that mona just fills in something that's just the bookstore. yet look you know in a well where which is bizarrely devaluing the truth. and the fact that it's beginning to become the norm which is you know terrifying. and that trump but now it's with speaker and it feels that trump is winning. so for people to come along and just say look here's the facts here's the truth. this isn't spun it's just it is what it is it's just so important. dates are very often replicates the systems of power that already exist maybe they ignore them. actual people maybe they ignore tiny religious and ethnic minorities and i think a big part of the future of state's journalism a big part of the future of fact checking is journalists going out and creating

their own data sets and that's incredibly difficult to do it's incredibly expensive right now but that again might be changing but i think it offers are some really exciting opportunities to break apart from those systems of power and to collect data in a way that better represents different communities. kenyan journalists in pursuit of press freedom and justice i have seen very discreet situations where someone seeking but they hope you can afford investigating government corruption and the national health care system some of the transactions espionage and the killing. of money that is unexplained to africa uncensored and published will see that some people will want to even if it doesn't live up to the oscar who's truth is it anyway on al-jazeera. from ancient embryos to communist leaders. age old philosophies of the rule of law remain

central to the world's oldest living civilization. in a 2 part series the big picture charts the rise of a 21st century superpower and examines the challenges it now faces from the outside and from within the china complex coming soon on al-jazeera. join me marry up from as i put the upfront questions to my special guests and challenge them to some straight talking political debate here on al-jazeera. from the al-jazeera london pool cost center to special guests in conversation when society is divided when women are divided the only thing that benefits from this contract itself from states uninterrupted is are 1st words for girls are those who work for him or. if you like to think that there's

nationalism is not as ugly as someone else's nationalists in studio unscripted on al-jazeera. hello i'm darren jordan doha with a program out of the top stories here on al-jazeera israel's attorney general has charged prime minister benjamin netanyahu with corruption that stems from 3 cases in which netanyahu was accused of bribery fraud and breach of trust are a force that reports from western. there's never been anything like it in israeli politics on the day the grinding stalemate over forming a new government and to the new unprecedented phase the attorney general was ready with his own historical 1st. today i informed the representative of the prime minister mr benjamin netanyahu about my decision to try him under an image that

manila concludes 3 charges a day in which the attorney general decide to set.