Posted by Jay Livingston
The best way to lie with statistics, says Andrew Gelman, is just lie. This graph from Fox news is a visual version of that. It’s published at Flowingdata.com via Media Matters.
The numbers are correct, but the Foxy graphmongers are making up the Y-axis as they go along. The 8.6% of November is higher than than 8.8%, 8.9%, and maybe even the 9.0% of the first three months of the year.
Or maybe it’s an optical illusion.
[HT: Max Livingston]
1 comment:
Your point that something fishy is going on with the points viz the y-axis is additionally more devious: the positioning of the points from March to June make the upward slope of unemployment seem steeper than what a proper depiction would show.
I overlaid an Excel graph (using the same BLS data) on the FOXNews graph, in order to capture the aspect ratio used in the original.
See here:http://umlud.blogspot.com/2011/12/foxnews-badly-as-well-as-subtly.html
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