Fox News sticking with painfully bad unemployment chart
July 01, 2010 1:24 pm ET by Jocelyn Fong
We noted earlier this week that Fox News aired a chart on unemployment data that fails the basic standards of graphic communication. Fox must have invested significant resources into the creation of the chart (indeed, it is a piece of work), because rather than let this outstanding display of incompetence pass quietly away, Fox aired the chart again on America's Newsroom yesterday (albeit with a revised title) and again today, on Fox & Friends:
That straight red line is lying to you. Fox distorted the scale of the horizontal and vertical axes and included only four data points, omitting any information from the 15-month period between March 2009 and June 2010. All that work just to falsely inform viewers that the unemployment trend has still not changed since the beginning of the recession.
As we noted, if you use an accurate scale and recreate Fox's chart with those same random data points, you get this:
And if you actually want to provide an accurate picture of how the unemployment level trend has changed since March 2009, you make a chart with 30 months of data over two-and-a-half years, rather than Fox's four, and you get this:
Fox & Friends' co-host Brian Kilmeade aired the chart this morning after asserting that the stimulus "doesn't seem to be helping." (Fortunately, there are economists out there whose methods of assessing the stimulus go beyond asking whether it "seems" to be helping. Unfortunately, Kilmeade doesn't know any of them)
Kilmeade said that since the stimulus "came out," the "unemployment numbers have gone up." He added, "Lets take a look at these figures ... I mean this has gone steadily up since it's been released."
We've seen no analysis of any kind on any subject from Fox News that isn't utterly infantile.
I mean that in the most literal sense. They have an extremely child-like understanding of the world.
He'd talk about how you had pressed on the brakes hard, and for an extended period of time, but he'd fail to tell his audience that when one is going 60 mph, it's not safe to slow any more quickly than what you've done, and he also wouldn't tell them that you started out at 60.
Because the real issue is that your car wasn't born in the United States.
Believe it or not, our economy is not a stand alone economy. When GWB's PRO-BUSINESS attitude TANKED our economy and it almost bottomed out in September 2008, the WORLD's economy was affected. The economy of Iceland was virtually destroyed because of their investments in American stocks.
You might want to get your head out of Fox/hate talk radio and do your own research. It's obvious from your post that you have NO clue what's going on around you.
The issue of an ongoing troubled economy has NOTHING to do with FoxNews pushing an inaccurate and deceptive graph.
Cutting government spending does not increase consumer demand.
Cutting unemployment does.
Putting people to work and keeping them in their jobs IS PRO Business.
What do THOSE FACTS have to do with the fact that FoxNews used a misleading chart?
Huh?
They aren't spinning ANYTHING, much less spinning something for Obama!
They're telling the truth. It's FoxNews that's spinning stuff.
And MMFA refutes conservative misinformation. True Blue conservatives would say that getting the dishonest people away from the right side of the aisle would be GOOD for conservatism - well, that is, except for the fact that there's hardly a single plank that true conservatives hold to that actually works in real life - and THAT's WHY they lie so much, because if they actually tried to succeed using the truth, they'll get laughed off the stage!
Fox & Friends are throwing rotten vegetables at the government while they try to fix this thing.
with the facts. fox and republicans have been saying the stimulus
was a failure since it was passed. they want it to fail soooooo
bad, but it hasn't. this is why they are reduced to putting up
deceptive graphs.