# The Economist — "Mistakes, we've drawn a few"

Sarah Leo, visual data journalist at The Economist. Supplied as PDF, read
2026-08-05. Answers queue row 4 (content; the canonical URL is still missing)
and settles claim **V1**.

Structure: her own archive, grouped into charts that are (1) misleading,
(2) confusing, (3) failing to make a point, each with a redesign at comparable
size.

## V1 — confirmed, but our note over-claimed it

The article's **first** example is `Mistake: Truncating the scale` — a bar chart
of average Facebook likes on posts by the political left:

> The original chart not only downplays the number of Mr Corbyn's likes but also
> exaggerates those on other posts.

So the sin is there, and it leads the piece. But it is **one** example, not the
"several" our citation note claimed. Note corrected to match. (She does add
that "avid followers of this blog will have seen another example of this bad
practice," which is a pointer elsewhere, not a second case here.)

## Unexpected: it contains our dual-axis sin, self-caught

`Mistake: Forcing a relationship by cherry-picking scales` — dog weights against
neck sizes, on a dual axis, looking perfectly correlated:

> In the original chart, both scales decrease by three units (from 21 to 18 on
> the left; from 45 to 42 on the right). In percentage terms, the left scale
> decreases by 14% while the right goes down by 7%.

Her takeaway is quotable and close to our page's:

> if two series follow each other too closely, it is probably a good idea to
> have a closer look at the scales.

Added as a citation on `dual-axis-correlation`. A newsroom catching itself doing
the exact thing is stronger evidence than a textbook saying not to.

## Also useful

- `Taking the "mind-stretch" a little too far` — trade deficit vs manufacturing
  employment, where "the two data series don't share a common baseline. The
  baseline of the trade deficit is at the top of the chart." Adjacent to our
  inverted-axis sin without being a case of it; cite carefully if at all.
- `Including too much detail` ("What a rainbow!") — stacked areas for ten
  countries. Her point that "since we are not plotting all euro-area countries
  it doesn't make any sense to stack the data" is a good detail for the stacked
  backlog entry: stacking implies the parts are the whole.
- She cites Francis Gagnon's rule of thumb — leave at least 33% of the plot area
  free under a line chart that doesn't start at zero. No source captured; not
  cited anywhere yet.