FOX NEWS- What more can you say!
More than 2.8 billion people get their news from Television and it pains to see how top news channels are creating news rather than showing the truth. It has now been a trend to highlight news with spice to gain viewership thus focusing more on money rather than their actual duty of enlightening people. The sinking of Maine is one such example where public opinion was stirred against Cuba by deceptive media. Such false claims nearly broke global war and all due to misconceptions portrayed through press of the time.
Here too we have the wonderful Fox news once again just trying their best to show something that does not quite match with their data. The dashboard shows unemployment rates during president Obama’s time at the white house in 2011. One can clearly see the line graph to be completely wrong at places for example in the last point above November the value for the line is 8.6% yet it is placed on the same level as 9%. one can clearly see point with 8.8% to be placed lower than point with 8.6%.
We have no knowledge of whether it was done due to political reasons or a technical mistake but one thing is clear, news tycoon like Fox know what they are doing and there are certainly less chances of it being a technical glitch. Numerous studies and experiments have found out that people believe what they see and this trend increases as the audience goes from being higher educated to lesser.
Such a dashboard has nothing good to say about except for the fact that may be the topic of discussion is worth our while since many people are facing the issues of unemployment in all the corners of the world. Moreover, it looks validated since they mention the name of Bureau of Labor Statistics as their source for the data.
Modification-
- The most basic modification that can be done is to primarily build a chart with a correct line graph. Now we can see why Fox news tried to be deceptive as the correct graph with same numbers shows how in the end of the year unemployment decreased at a fast pace. The graph shown by Fox news depicts a whole different message than a correct one even though they have the same data. https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0B8KmJc9yUb7ybnNwSjBSc0xYSGc/view?usp=sharing
- It would certainly have been better had they shown the trends of unemployment of previous years and compared them with this graph thus giving a broader picture to its audience. Each year shows a wide variety of fluctuations and in such situations, it helps to know the overall fluctuation to gain a higher understanding of such important topic.
https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0B8KmJc9yUb7yV09OUnNIazNrcU0/view?usp=sharing