American as apple pie
There’s a great pie-chart doing the rounds on the Internet that I can’t resist reproducing. Apologies if you've seen it before.
It originated on Fox News and shows support for three potential Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination.
As the website Wonkette pointed out, evidently all 193 per cent of Republicans support Palin, Romney and Huckabee. One comment sums it up: “I respect the Fox perspective on this. Why go for 100 per cent when you can do so much more?”
Professor Hale (not verified) wrote,
Wed, 02/12/2009 - 16:27
I've seen this before too. Do you know if it is a legitimate Fox news sources item? With Photoshop in such wide use, I find it difficult to trust any pictures that show such an obvious failing.
Assuming that the journaists at Fox are just like the ones at CNN and MSNBC and never took a math course in Journalism school, I would still notice that most programs that would produce a pie chart would not permit you to create one with more than 100%.
Nigel Hawkes (not verified) wrote,
Wed, 02/12/2009 - 17:56
Good question. I'll happily take it down if anybody has evidence it's a fake. There's a possible explanation of how it might have happened on the Wonkette site. If you enter the values in Excel to create a bar chart - and then decide to change it to a pie-chart without changing "Label Contains Value" to "Label Contains Percentages" - this is the result you might get. Or so he says! I haven't tried it.
Tom Snowden (not verified) wrote,
Sat, 05/12/2009 - 21:36
It was based upon a poll (http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/111909_PalinPoll.pdf) where respondants were asked how favourably they viewed various individuals. Even disregarding the god awful misuse of a pie chart, stating that the respondants 'back' these individuals for the GOP candidacy on the chart seems a little strong given the actual nature of the questioning.
Anonymous (not verified) wrote,
Wed, 24/03/2010 - 19:54
I believe situations like these are why we have Venn diagrams.
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