Statistical Lies
Unemployment
Unemployment in the United States is something that is currently an issue that people have been facing since the Coronavirus caused many jobs to shut down. Before we dive deep into how unemployment rate can be used to show bias, we must first understand how unemployment is calculated.
Table A-15 is how the US Bureau of Labor Statistics categorizes and calculates percentages of unemployment. As shown there are six different categorizes followed by percentages. U-1 having the smallest demographic of people who are unemployed 15 weeks or longer and U-6 having the largest demographic. This is where issues could and have risen when being displayed as graphics.
Misuse of Data
In 2012, Fox News displayed a graphic that compared unemployment rates from before the Obama Administration and during the Obama Administration. According to the article on MSNBC, the graphic displayed two different categories of unemployment. First, the U-3 for pre-Obama Administration, and the U-6 during the Obama Administration.
As we can clearly see, U-3 is the “Official Unemployment Rate” and is compared to U-6 which is “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” This is using two different categories for a before and after visualization and does not accurately represent what is being compared and is clearly using statistical data which is from the same table to negatively impact the view of the Obama Administration.
Statistics can be manipulated in different forms to create misinterpreted images of data to fit the needs of whoever created the visualization of data. In this case it was the media to push their own agenda and show bias. I will leave you with the great words of Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
