Fox Still Struggling With Basic Chart Concepts: Gas Price Edition
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201202210011
Fox Still Struggling With Basic Chart Concepts: Gas Price Edition
February 21, 2012 5:09 pm ET by Shauna Theel
In a segment falsely blaming Obama for rising gasoline prices, Fox News' America's Newsroom aired the following chart yesterday. It shows three data points -- including the vague "last year" -- plotted nonsensically on the x-axis:
"Last year" refers to gas prices last February; Fox's chart omitted what happened in the 13 months between February 2011 and last week. Here's how Fox's source, AAA, displays the data (green line):
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The peaks and valleys of this chart would be flattened considerably if the y-axis on the chart went all the way to zero instead of starting at $1.94.
However, we must hand it to Faux News for skewing the chart on the x-axis and the y-axis. 
that gas was pretty consistently around $2/gal from 2009-2010 and didn't spike to $3+/gal UNTIL after the 2010 midterms that swept Republicans into office all over the country and the House of Representatives. Coincidence?
Now, they're saying that prices may spike to an ungodly $4-5/gal this year yet we're supposed to believe that it's all the fault of President Obama's policies? And, of course, the Republicans have no legislation pending to immediately help blunt gas prices. Their "plan", which they're already actively telegraphing, is to sit on their hands until the price spikes hit and use that to repeatedly hit President Obama over the head with over and over again until the election. They won't offer any solutions that will have any immediate impact. No bills on curbing oil speculation or subsidies will be introduced (or approved) by them. No, they'll just keep flogging President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline to try to convince everybody that the spike in gas prices has everything to do with his rejection of Keystone XL. Will most people buy into it? 
