By Doug Noonan and Joanna Woronkowicz
Last week, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was forced out, reportedly for delivering jobs numbers that didn’t align with Donald Trump’s preferred narrative. The firing sparked outrage, especially among those who see it as an attack on the integrity of public data. But beyond the politics, there’s a deeper lesson here—one that the arts and cultural sector would do well to heed.
We say we want truth. We say we care about facts. We say it’s wrong to fire the messenger just because the message is inconvenient. But if we’re honest, how often do we behave differently?
The BLS doesn’t exist to make the president look good. It exists to collect, analyze, and publish labor market data—warts and all—so that policymakers, researchers, businesses, and the public can understand what’s really going on. That’s what makes data a public good. The moment we demand only good news, we stop doing data and start doing propaganda.
The arts sector isn’t immune to this impulse. We often celebrate numbers that show growth—record attendance, rising economic impact, job creation—while quietly ignoring the data that suggests stagnation, inefficiency, inequality, or decline. It’s understandable. The sector has been underfunded, undervalued, and politically vulnerable for decades. But cherry-picking only the sunny stats erodes trust and weakens our ability to respond to real problems or argue for change.
In other words, we need to build a culture where “bad news” data are not feared, but welcomed as a signal. As a prompt. As information we can use to do better.
This isn’t just a sector-wide issue. It applies at the organizational level, too. Museum directors, grantmakers, and nonprofit leaders can’t afford to treat data as a vanity project. If you only look for confirmation of your success, or only accept positive results, you are doing your organization—and the communities you serve—a disservice.
What we need is a culture that seeks data, not just accepts it. That actively looks for signals, even if they might challenge our assumptions or force uncomfortable conversations. But not knowing is not neutral. It’s a choice to remain in the dark.
If we criticize political leaders for rejecting inconvenient data—as we should—then we must also hold ourselves to the same standard. We can’t expect the public to value arts data if we only treat them as useful when it flatters us. And we certainly can’t build lasting solutions to deep structural challenges—audience disengagement, funding inequities—if we don’t understand the full scope of the problems.
That means supporting not just applied research that makes us look good, but also basic research that helps us understand what’s really happening in the field—who’s thriving, who’s struggling, where the bottlenecks are, what the structural dynamics look like. It means investing in infrastructure that allows us to collect and analyze data consistently and independently, not just when it’s convenient or flattering.
Data are a public good, but they are also an organizational good. Data should be something we all share—not owned by funders or institutions or advocacy shops, but held in trust for the public. Bad news isn’t a threat—it’s information. And information is the starting point of strategy.
Because if we only accept data that confirms our narratives, or we only use data as a matter of convenience, we’re no better than the leaders we criticize for doing the same.