Lying With Statistics: CBS Edition

I’ve been working on a longer post about the RealPage suit the DOJ dropped in August, but some things are so awful they should be called out in real-time. Like this travesty:

A close-up of the image, since the BlueSky embed isn’t working as expected:

Image posted by Daniel Drezner, @dandrezner.bsky.social, 10/1/24

I refused to believe this was a real graph. It’s like a cryptid pic, but worse because it was — purportedly — made to inform people.So, I started looking for independent confirmation. It was easy to find — I went to YouTube and reviewed CBS’s posted footage and there it was:

The chart appears at 4:47:28,

In every discussion I saw where this graphic was posted, the comments section was pretty unanimous: the chart was bad, the correct data was ridiculously easy to source, and CBS should never have posted something so misinformative.

However, I found this post on BlueSky, , and . Each had a handful of comments with the correct data and noting it was bad. But the preliminary numbers on who may have seen it? The YouTube video above had over 3.2 million views at the time of this writing.

Who knows how many people saw that and walked away woefully misinformed?If you’re reading this and not clear on just how bad the above graph is, note that the timescale for each statistic being compared does not match. The cost increase in groceries is since January of 2021; the increase in wages is since September 2023. This means that comparing those values offers no real insight into how wages have or have not kept up with increases in goods like groceries.A better graph would have looked like this:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private [AHETPI], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; October 1, 2024.

This chart, also using data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics but with the timeframes, the same for both values, shows that while the increase in grocery prices spiked well above the hourly wage in 2022 and 2023, the difference has nearly disappeared since grocery prices have stayed mostly flat since then while wages have continued to increase.CBS, do better.