Fun With Charts, Fox News Edition
[Via Daring Fireball]
Almost comically shameless.
[More]
Here is the graph used on FOX News.

See the source – AAA Fuel Gauge report. Here is the graph from the AAA:

Very different looking curves. Cherrypicking data points is one of the ways people lie with data. FOX could easily have made a similar point by using all the data.
Wonder why they did not? Probably because it is always so much easier to make a rhetorical point if one picks only a portion of the data. Using all of them just makes things too complex, I guess.
But by connecting the points, they imply that intermediate positions fall along the curve, which they do not.
A bar chart would have been slightly more honest. Like this:

Then someone with the sound off would not get a different impression of the data. But then notice the Y-axis. It does not start at 0, in order to highlight the ‘huge’ change. Here is the graph starting at 0 so you can see the relative changes:

A much better representation of the data as it properly provides the context for the changes.
It just does not make the emotional rhetorical point FOX wanted to make. It was easier for them to mislead their viewers.
And for even more, let’s look at the long-term historical prices:

Wow, by FOX’s logic Bush was responsible for the largest gas prices in our history. And, if you want to give Obama the blame, then you must also give him credit for lowering the gas prices in 2011.
Except, as I discuss below, I do not think the President or his policies can do anything put a short-term fix on a long-term problem.
Let’s look even further back:

And here is one going back to the 20s (the slight differences in the absolute prices seen come from the different years chosen to adjust inflation to)

From the whole set of data, you can see that there has been a decrease in average price from 1920 until about 2000 (the Iraq I war being a huge blip). Yet, since about 2000, there has been a significant change , with a distinct upward trend.
Guess what? This fits timewise with the data I showed yesterday – starting about 2000, the price of oil shifted to a different state. Since then the price of oil no longer correlates well to production. The price of oil is no longer dependent on oil production. Its price varies independent of oil production rates.
I suspect that – as we can no longer increase oil production to meet demand – that speculation on the spot markets and increasing demand have a much greater effect on gas prices than anything a President can do. While doing something legislatively might drop the price for a bit , it does nothing to change the underlying trend which will eventually catch up.
Putting a bandaid on the problem – blame Obama – will not change things. It will only result in gangrene later on.
We need to be brave and amputate our dependence on oil. Until we do, the underlying problem will not be fixed.
But it was easier for FOX just to mislead with a graph and blame Obama. Political expediency must be more important than actually informing.
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