Question

Support the court? A news network reported the results of a survey about a controversial court decision. The network initially posted on its website a bar graph of the data similar to the one that follows. Explain how this graph is misleading. (Note: When notified about the misleading nature of its graph, the network posted a corrected version.)

Short answer

Beacuse in the given bar graph, the bars do not begin at zero.

Step-by-step solution

Step 1. Given information.

The given bar graph is shown below:

Step 2. Explanation.

The graph is deceptive because the bars in the bar graph do not begin at zero (they begin at 53).

This thus misleads the graph by exaggerating the disparities between the various categories.

For example, the "Democrats" bar looks to be 9 times higher than the "Republican" bar, implying that the percentage of Democrats is approximately 9 times higher than the percentage of Republicans.

However, approximately 62 percent of Democrats agree, whereas approximately 54 percent of Republicans agree, and 62 percent is not nearly 9 times greater than 54 percent.