The complaint made by Straight Statistics reader John Huggins to the Press Complaints Commission against The Guardian has been rejected.

 Mr Huggins complained that a graph on page 1 of The Guardian on August 13 misrepresented youth unemployment by curtailing the vertical axis. This exaggerated the change in unemployment rates, at first glance implying they had risen six-fold.
 
Graphs with a “depressed zero” are commonplace, and to some – clearly including Mr Huggins – reprehensible. But the PCC takes the view that so long as the vertical axis is clearly marked, as it was in this case, the reader is not misled. So the PCC code on accuracy was not breached, it has ruled.
 
Mr Huggins is unpersuaded. He agrees that numerate readers would take the trouble to read the axes in order to interpret the chart, but that these are the very readers who would have no need of a chart anyway. Those who are not very numerate and need a chart would have got a very misleading view, he says, appealing to the PCC to think again.