Chart of the Day: The Blogosphere Has Too Many Damn Charts

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Reihan Salam on how to persuade people:

If you want to change people’s minds, graphs and charts might be more effective than words alone. I sense that the word is out about this phenomenon, and that it is being used and abused. But that is another matter entirely.

I don’t know if Reihan is using “abused” in the sense of used too much, or in the sense of people lying with statistics. If it’s the latter, I can’t say that I’ve noticed charts being used any more deceptively than before. But if it’s the former, I’m sadly in agreement. I love presenting information in a graphical format, but this is now so omnipresent in the wonkosphere that even I tend to switch off when I see a headline that says something like “Everything you need to know about [xxx] in two charts.” Charts can illuminate, but they rarely explain everything, and posts with headlines like that seldom deliver the goods.

It’s possible, of course, that my real beef is with the headlines, not the charts. If the same post simply said something like “Drought now covering 23 states,” and there was a nice map showing which states were suffering from drought, I’d probably think nothing of it. The map is a good tool for making the information more easily accessible. Still, it doesn’t explain everything. In fact, it’s not even the reason for the post. It’s just a visual aid for something else. We should all remember that more often.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate