Five Ways to Lie With Graphs

[ronwagn + 6,290]

http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/five-ways-to-lie-with-charts

We need to learn to analyze charts carefully. We can easily be fooled by them, if we are not careful!

Reuters has a great reputation, but their COVID 19 graph of deaths tends to deceive by showing the deaths as a large growing space over time rather than like a vertical graph that shows the various growth marks in proportion to each day, week, or month. See it at the link below.

https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS-USA/0100B5K8423/index.html

May 4th is the halfway mark in deaths as of today 7/15/20 but look at how small a shaded area it gets compared to the second half of that period. 

I am no math whiz, but I have spent a lot of time analyzing COVID 19 graphs and caught this. Panic pandering seems to be a huge issue to me, you are free to disagree on that. Do you agree that showing this often used graph is deceptive, although possibly innocently?