Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ (2021)


Objective

The objective of the original visualization was to present the decline in Christianity across the United States over the last 10 years. However, Fox News aimed to dramatize the stats in order to spread fear and artificially strengthen their message.

They did this intentionally as they are aware that their target audience and main demographic are right-leaning conservatives. Given the conservative political beliefs of their viewers, a fair portion of them are likely to be Christian. Hence, they dramatized this chart to further engage that target audience.

The visualization chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Deceptive Methods

    First and foremost, the most obvious error here was that they had their y axis ranging from 58% to 78%. For the average data analyst, this was easy to spot. For a many people, especially elderly viewers, this may be easy to miss. As stated previously, this was done intentionally to artifically widen the gap between the 2009 percentage bar and the 2019 one. As these are percentage values, the y axis should range from 0-100 instead.

  • Perceived Bias

    It is not uncommon knowledge that Fox is objectively biased when it comes to presenting news (Gramlich, 2020, https://pewrsr.ch/3OKXhrH). With only 4 in 10 Americans actually trusting Fox News, it isn’t a reputable source either. They are aware of their conservative audience, and have had several similar practices of intentional bias in the past. This parallels with the deliberate distortion of the y axis mentioned above, in an effort to further appeal to their audience.

  • Insufficient Data

    Tucker Carlson is supposedly attempting to present the ‘decline’ in Christianity. Hence, the graph should show the percentage for each of the ten years, instead of just 2009 and 2019. This would show a more fair and better-scoped representation of the fall in Christianity in America.

Reference

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)
christianity <- data.frame(Year = c("Dec-2009", "Dec-2010", "Dec-2011",
                                  "Dec-2012", "Dec-2013", "Dec-2014",
                                  "Dec-2015", "Dec-2016", "Dec-2017",
                                  "Dec-2018/19"),
                      Perc = c(77,76,75,73,73,71,69,68,67,65))

p1 <- ggplot(data = christianity, aes(group=1, x = Year,y = Perc, label=paste0(Perc, "%"))) + 
      geom_bar(stat="identity", width=0.5, alpha=0.5, fill="#3ec7fa") +
      geom_line(stat="identity", color='red') +
      ylim(0,100) +
      geom_point() +
      geom_text(hjust=0.5, vjust=-1.3, size=3) +
      labs(y="Americans Identifying as Christian (%)", title="Percentage of Americans That Identify as Christian from 2009-2019") +
      theme(axis.title.y = element_text(size=10)) +
      theme(axis.text.x = element_text(size=8))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.