A great graphic of how important a visual can be.
Fox News tried to show the change in the top tax rate if the Bush tax cuts expire, so they showed the rate now and what'd it be in 2013. Wow, it'll be around five times higher.
Wait. No.
The value axis starts at 34 percent instead of zero, which you don't do with bar charts, because length is the visual cue. That is to say, when you look at this chart, you compare how high each bar is. Fox News might as well have started the vertical axis at 34.9 percent. That would've been more dramatic.
Here's what the bar chart is supposed to look like:
With a difference of 4.6 percentage points, the change doesn't look so crazy.
[via
Effective Graphs]
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