This is Stephanie from StatisticsHowTo.com, and in this video I will be showing you different
types of misleading graphs. The first type of problem I will be showing
you is to do with the vertical scale. That is the scale over here and if you take
a close look although it looks like if Bush tax cuts expire, it is going to be disastrous.
The facts are the scales starts at 34% that is only going to be a slight jump in the top
tax rate. Not this ballooning tax rate jump, that fox
news wanted you to believe. The second type of misleading graph is where
data is incorrectly plotted. And not to keep bashing Fox News, but this graph
did appear on Fox News and it was the unemployment rate and how it’s risen and stayed
Pretty stagnant under President Obama but if you look at this last point here, 8.6%
is plotted incorrectly. If it had been plotted correctly, it would
actually have shown a drop in the unemployment rate.
Another problem with graph is incomplete data. This particular graph in the CBPP Analysis
shows the Economic downturn and legacy of Bush policies, these drive record deficits.
Well, the years we are looking at from 2009 until 2019 is no data prior from 2009 being shown.
If it have been shown it would have demonstrated that in 2007.
The budget was just 1.2% of GDP, and that was when the housing market collapsed.
So if you are going to show an economic downturn and say something like a record deficit,
you really want to go back in time as far as you possibly can before you starti saying record
deficits. This type of graph is just completely missing
an axis. There is no vertical axis here, there’s
nothing labelled. We have no idea of what this is supposed to
represent. Lanacane is apparently better than hydrocortisone
at relieving itch after a minute. I think but I am not sure but this was an
actual ad for Lanacane and it’s just a dreadful graph.
Here is an example of a graph where, it is all read just completely wrong.
This image was from the Mall on Sunday, a British News Paper.
And the tabloid used it to claim that global warming had stopped.
Unfortunately the guy who wrote the article his name was David Rose.
He did not understand what the graph was telling him.
He made a couple of errors. First of all the graph is showing air temperatures.
And it is a very poor measure of global warming as much of the air temperature heat ends up
in the oceans. So he interpreted the graph to mean that Global
Warming had stopped, when in fact you can’t deduce that from
the graph at all. And we are back to Fox News for this one.
This is an example of a graph where the numbers just don’t add up.
A pie chart should add up to 100% but if you add the figures in this chart it’s not quite
a 100%. I don’t know what the Fox News Statisticians
were doing in this one but the numbers just did not add up.
This graph I am not even sure I could read it,
if you look at the graph it looks like the statement is true,
the job and health insurances losses are accelerating, they are going up.
But if you look over here, uninsured Americans, and then you look over here unemployment rate,
there's two y-axes. And it looks like, if we are over here we
go in the millions of people and this might be a percentage but I am already confused.
So when you are making a graph you should only put one y-axis unless you want people
to be confused, unless you want to deceive them. And finally the winner in the misleading graphs
category is. Drum roll please to Fox News for this gem.
Looks like there are more people in welfare than there are who have full time jobs.
As media matters points out, Fox's figure of the number of people in welfare comes from
a census bureau account of participation in means tested programs.
Anybody that live in a household with somebody, i.e. your mom, your dad, your brother Joe,
your cousin Sam, if anybody was receiving any kind of welfare benefits, then every individual
in that house was counted. On the other hand people with a full time job,
the figure Fox used included only individuals who worked not individuals residing in a household
where at least one person works. Check us at StatisticsHowTo.com for more articles
and videos on everything Statistics.