Lies, damn lies and infographics (original) (raw)
footpad drowsy
December 25 2012, 13:33
I don't know why I still read the BBC News web site.
Its science-and-technology reporting varies from the naive to the merely facile, and I can feel its strict single-sentence-per-paragraph policy killing off my synapses.
Anyway, today something ticked me off enough for me to actually fire off a gripe to the BBC about it.
I'll be interested to see if they acknowledge my complaint, and maybe even act on it. I tried hard to make it clear and comprehensible.
I even restricted myself to at most two sentences per paragraph.
Dear BBC,
I object to your choice of graphic at the top of Matt McGrath's story, "West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate" (URL as below).
The graphic is a map of Antarctica, mostly in shades of pale blue, but with an intense shading towards red in the region of Byrd station.
Given its choice of colours, and its place in an article on Antarctic warming, the map naturally suggests drastic warming in the region of Byrd. It is easy for many readers to draw this conclusion without looking further.
In fact, on close examination of the legend, the map turns out to show correlation of weather with Byrd station. All it says is, that weather near Byrd tends to be like the weather at Byrd!
The graphic therefore strongly suggests an emotive conclusion, while actually indicating something far more innocuous.
Readers who notice this disparity will be annoyed by it; readers who don't will be misinformed. The more paranoid global-warming skeptics may even take it as evidence of deliberate misinformation on the part of the BBC.
Please change the graphic, or at least label it conspicuously and move it closer to the last paragraph of the article, where it does at least bear some relevance.
Kind regards,
David