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]
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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