Perhaps you are following the recent mischief Elon Musk directed at National Public Radio NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Both have withdrawn from Twitter after Musk correctly labeled them “state-affiliated media.” It is fun to watch NPR and PBS twist themselves into pretzels, claiming on the one hand that they receive only a tiny amount of taxpayer money (then why not give it up?) and that it doesn’t affect their journalistic independence (stop laughing), and on the other hand than taxpayer support is “essential” to their mission. I have a theory for this government funding dependence that I’ll roll out some other time. (Hint: It’s not about the money. It’s about status and self-worth.)
But if you really want to see dishonest doublespeak in action, you have to head up to Canada, where the government-controlled Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC—Canada’s version of the BBC and NPR rolled into one) put out the chart below attempting to show they are not that dependent on government aid. Notice something odd about it? (If not, look closer at the circled part of the y-axis.)
The little squiggly mark that compresses the axis and shrinks the true size of the pink part of the bar relative to the size of the other bars is known in the chartmaking trade as a “tilda,” and while acceptable at the bottom of a vertical axis to indicate the data series does not start at zero, to place it in the middle of an axis like this is straight out deception, hoping that viewers won’t notice that it makes a billion dollars vanish. The pink bars depicting government funding should be more than twice the size of the dark blue bars. Here’s what it would look like if you fixed it:
But this is just standard practice for a media organization that deceives the public every day.
P.S. If you stacked the bars instead of splitting them out, it would look like this:
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