CNN Has a Strong Contender for the Worst Chart You’ll Ever See | Hacker News Reader

CNN Has a Strong Contender for the Worst Chart You’ll Ever See

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62 pointsTomte33 comments

I couldn't even tell what it was measuring until seeing it explained in the Twitter comments. Apparently it's an estimate of the percentage of American adults who think violent crime is a problem, for whatever reason going backwards through time at a non-uniform rate. Even after that being explained, I don't see anywhere this is indicated on the graphic, so I have to assume this person looked it up using Pew Foundation's real publication.

Things wrong (maybe not exhaustive):

- x-axis ordered right-to-left

- inconsistent scale in x-axis

- y-axis values that “tell the story “ are all within the margin of error (ie is there even a story?)

- y-axis doesn’t start at 0.0

- brick wall background ticks don’t appear to relate to y-axis

Aesthetic, but:

- useless area shading and random opacity changes (unless this is a photo of a screen?)

Also the story is itself nothing. Apart from basically all the data laying in the MOE, the increase comes from the anomalous year: of course crime went up after covid. Did it go up higher than previous years? This chart couldn’t tell you.

Almost nothing will beat WaPo's comprehensive collection of stats and visuals in response to the police shootings brouhaha [1] that told you just about everything except the most relevant detail: a total of just 38 unarmed Black people were killed by police in the US since 2014 [2]. There are approximately 10 million arrests per year in the US and countless more police encounters.

There is no shortage of contortions a media outlet will indulge in (on both sides) in order to brainwash you into accepting their politically-motivated narrative. It's egregious.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...

The actual chart: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4m6HfFVIAMw5BW?format=jpg

I think reversing the x-axis was a particularly inventive choice!

And using a different interval for every tick-mark. That's something I never considered looking out for before. What possible credential and/or experience could you have, to get this job at CNN and also create this graphic?

It makes me wonder the extent to which it’s diabolical, as though someone can get a PhD in manipulative statical disinformation. Surely there are layers of approval for this.

Polish state TV also does have strong entry in this category: https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_1623238768TSBQUXC0...

I was reminded of another chart that I see on a US-based media organisation (can't remember the org, sorry, but definitely not CNN) that has an inverted y-axis.

Who will be the next "talented" org that will do a graph with both axes inverted (without justification)?

Maybe this one? https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-deaths-in-florida-increa...

Yes!

P.S. It was not Business Insider (as the URL implied), it was Reuters.

Its bad, sure, but I’ve seen thousands worse; its a strong contender for the worst I’ll see today, sure.

Did you notice that the dates are right to left as well as different time periods?

I’ve never seen one this bad

> Did you notice that the dates are right to left as well as different time periods?

Yes.

To be in among the worst I've seen it would have to at least use an inconsistent scale on, or invert (both would really move it up in the rankings) the Y axis, too.

What will it take to finally destroy CNN’s credibility?

I feel like the “MSM” has an inherent advantage by being first in line to receive info from government officials. Social media offers the illusion of influence – it feels like you’ve got the MSM beat - until you realize that the only stories anyone discusses are those that fit within the narrative established by the MSM.

As long as we allow these corporate news orgs to define the bounds of discussion, we’ll never escape this rage-maximizing cycle of Overton window shifting that we all collectively subject ourselves to.

It was difficult to find the link to the chart, because it looks like the title of the post. (In case you still can't find it https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1407861007209222151 )

[spoiler alert] At least it's not a pie chart.

Clearly CNN needs to pay much, much more for talent

Alternatively they pay a lot to get a graph that is “accurate”, but at a glance shows a storyline that they want

The wizard of odds made it

@dang, maybe it would make more sense to link to the twitter post at https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1407861007209222151 since tfa doesn't anything, but actually only obscure the chart in question.

It's more reliable to send an email to hn@ycombinato.com Sometimes dang does not find these suggestions.

* hn@ycombinato.com -> hn@ycombinator.com

Tweet posts get auto-downweighed here so there's big incentives* to post like that as annoying as it is.

* We wouldn't even be seeing this given the number of upvotes if it was a link to the tweet.

Ok, I've changed from https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/06/24/cnn-chart-crime. Although "This chart is a violent crime" is pretty good gloss (and "I hope they get hit by a bus" is...good grief twitter)

as long as they can’t hide the rising crime wave anymore I don’t really care what charts they use.

Defund the police some more it would surely help.

Nobody would be this dense to do this deliberately. What follows from this I don't know.

Why do you believe that? More than a few people at CNN signed off on this before airing to the world.

That was my point (I mean, how many people must consider their readers that stupid to post a chart like this?)

> I mean, how many people must consider their readers that stupid to post a chart like this?

Apparently CNN.

> More than a few people at CNN signed off on this before airing to the world.

I always had the impression that a lot of this kind of stuff is produced in a hurry, not infrequently by lowly paid interns and the like. Especially if there's a news item just 30 minutes before airing time you got to race to produce this and there isn't really time for a proper signing-off procedure.

You don't reverse an axis by accident.

How do you know? Could just be a screw-up in the software they used to generate it somehow; i.e. they filled in the labels in the wrong order, were in a hurry, and no one noticed in time. I didn't even notice it originally.

> Nobody would be this dense to do this deliberately

That makes more sense with “... accidentally” than “...deliberately”.

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