Nate Silver and 538 are fairly hardcore Bayesians, and this is how pretty much all Bayesian thinking works.
You start out with some prior "sentiment" (a.k.a. prior belief), and use then use data to update your "sentiment".
In turn, invalid data would mean that you'd revert back to your original prior sentiment, and when you get new data you'd start Bayesian inference once again.
Edit: Looking at the on-the-ground investigative reporting and the other sources and studies they've cited in the related articles, I actually agree that they have decent evidence to support their belief without these data sets.[0][1]
I mean, ignoring the data sets, would you argue against the idea that many people in cities can't afford broadband or that many places in rural America have crummy internet infrastructure? Certainly, I'm less confident than I would be with the additional data, but my confidence is still relatively high without it.
I do agree with your other points. Mobile internet access--with or without hotspots--is unreasonably ignored. The conflation between access and usage was a lesser concern since I managed to navigate the articles well enough.
[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-a...
[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...
It's just a sentiment. I have a strong sentiment that LTE reception in the middle of the Sahara is terrible. I haven't collected any data whatsoever to support that sentiment, yet I fully stand by it. There's nothing disingeneous about that.
You do make a reasonable point about usage and access. Which is more relevant depends on what you're trying to show. Access is whether you can get it at all while usage could well bring in economics as well.
It's a fair point about LTE. They don't seem to have included satellite either, which definitely gets used in rural areas where nothing else is available. I suspect though that neither of these would affect overall conclusions that much.
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
"After further reporting, we can no longer vouch for the academics’ data set. The preponderance of evidence we’ve collected has led us to conclude that it is fundamentally flawed.... The idea behind the stories was to demonstrate that broadband is not ubiquitous in the U.S. today, even as more of our lives and the economy go online. We stand by this sentiment and the on-the-ground reporting in the two stories even though we have lost confidence in the data set."
If the data you used to reach a conclusion is fundamentally flawed, it's pretty disingenuous to claim you stand by the sentiment. So they started with a conclusion, set out to prove it, later found the data they used to prove it was flawed, but still believe it's true.
The second thing I don't like is it seems readers are very confused between access and usage and their sloppy wording often conflates the two. It appears they were studying usage (actual subscriptions) not access (availability of a high speed connection).
Lastly, they also seem to disregard an LTE wireless connection as usage of broadband, when I would have assumed it would clearly be considered. If LTE wireless is more commonly used as a form of access to broadband internet in certain areas (i.e. rural areas where density can't justify running the fiber, or dense metro where the LTE is so good there's no need for a wire) then not surprising you'll find broadband "usage" is low in those areas, even if those households are absolutely using broadband internet through an LTE hotspot.