Your point reminds me of an anecdote from a talk [1] shared on HN a few days ago [2] where the speaker quoted Saul Bellow on FDR's fireside chats as saying people were "not considering but affirming" their content. The point of that article was expressing similarities between the adoption of radio and that of the internet, and in that particular anecdote showing that one of the dangers of radio was its ability to communicate with, and persuade people by emotion and sentiment more than facts. Poignant, then, to see an example like this where the internet likewise is interested in swaying by sentiment rather than, even in place of, facts.

Although, in some ways, what FiveThirtyEight is saying is worse than the Bellow quotation. They have not just "not considered," but have re-considered and decided to disregard the facts, while affirming what they originally wanted those facts to demonstrate. Just take their example of D.C., where they used a number that said there was 28.8% coverage, when in reality the coverage is 70%+. How can they then justify the sentiment that even metropolitan places like D.C. lack coverage?

The discrepancy, in their words, comes from totally different definitions: "We looked into it and found that the data set we used had a fundamentally different understanding of broadband access than other sources did." That FiveThirtyEight would stand by a sentiment derived from one definition of broadband coverage, and apply it to a definition that yields entirely different, indeed contradictory, data, seems irresponsible.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106331