CTV fails in basic graphing
- Thu Sep 18 2008
- Canada
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Take a look at this graph:
That graph is from this CTV story about poll numbers in Quebec slipping for the Conservatives.
Now many ways does this poll fail? Let’s count them.
One: what do the different colours mean? Being astute followers of Canadian politics we all know that Conservatives are blue and Liberals are red. But which red are the Liberals? Dark red or light red? Follow-up question for the non-Canadians: which party is orange?
Two: What happened to September 11?
Three: If you count up the days in the last two labels (”Sept 4-10″ and “Sept 12-18″) you get 14 days. Why are there only eleven points on the graph?
Four: Sure, we know that these are polling numbers and the numbers up the y-axis are probably percentages of voters who say they’ll vote for a given party, but do we know that for sure? Maybe that’s the number of ridings in Quebec going to each party! (Never mind that there are 75 ridings in Quebec and the first two data points add up to more than that)
CTV, hire someone who knows how to chart some numbers on a graph. It’s not that hard.
One Response to “CTV fails in basic graphing”
Fri Sep 19 2008
11:56 am
I think the fact it goes 2004, 2006 and then September quite confusing, it gets even weirder when you consider that the two weeks at the end take up the same amount of space as the previous two years, which is really leading the reader as the data points are not that far away from where they were previously, it just looks like they have gone wild. Maybe it was their “first time”.
Is the green line the Green party ?
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