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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Reporters don't make the charts. It's the Wall Street Journal, not a blog. There's and entire art department for that sort of thing.

Also, charts like that are very common in financial publications. The target audience knows how to read them.

Edit: The original link was WSJ. It's since been changed to Bloomberg, presumably because of the Journal's paywall, but the point still stands.

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> Also, charts like that are very common in financial publications. The target audience knows how to read them.

Yea, I've never really understood this complaint. Except in publications targeted only at the most ignorant or innumerate audiences, it's ludicrous to claim that the only magnitude of change that can matter is one that's visible on a 0-100 scale.

Ignorant and innumerate audiences do exist, but this isn't a general-purpose argument against ever having enough respect for your audience that you can use the scale that lets you most accurately convey the data.

So you are saying reporters don't have any say in what images appear as part of their reports?

Also, this arts department you talk of - is still part of the reputed publication? Or does arts mean they don't follow the basic paradigms?

So you are saying reporters don't have any say in what images appear as part of their reports?

I'm not saying "any" say, but in my experience working for two major newspaper companies, it's not a given. There are other people who decide that. Again, it's not a blog.

So we should have lower standards for “major newspaper companies” as opposed to blogs?

How is the WSJ's credibility any better than a blog? >The Wall Street Journal is the most trusted news source in the country, according to the index, with 57.7% of Americans trusting it. All polls are biased based on how you ask questions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonysilber/2018/10/03/the-wall-... I'd say little more than half the poll is about as irrelevant as a blog. Either you trust something because of confirmation bias or you don't. Disregarding blogs as somehow being less credible, holds traditional media to a higher standard which they have chosen to abandon for partisan reporting over the past 10 years. Other random sources for comparison/counterpoints: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/principl...

How is the WSJ's credibility any better than a blog

If you seriously don't know the difference between a 129-year-old newspaper that has won countless journalism awards, has broken world-changing news, is respected both among its peers and by millions of readers versus some rando blog, then I really don't know what to tell you.

> I really don't know what to tell you.

You can start with a good defense of why these charts are so grossly misleading

WSJ takes huge legal risks in order to provide honest, ground-breaking reporting that makes society better. They were responsible, for example, for the Theranos exposé.

It doesn't matter who does it. What matters is as the end user reading that article this is pretty misleading. So from that standpoint, the journalist writing the article is implicated by default since he/she literally writes their name on the article. And frankly they should feel responsible for it.

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