I curse the day that I bought shares. I bought them in combination with an house mortgage. And before you laugh at my naivety. I’ve done rather well thank you very much. Especially when you consider the amount of financial and economical crises we’ve had the past eight years. Thank god my cynicism protects me from grave blunders. But still I wished I hadn’t begun the ultimate game of greed. I can’t help it, but I have to check the indexes regularly and gloomy financial news frightens the hell out of me every time. On April the 29th I had a big scare when I saw the infographic on the frontpage of the Volkskrant.

The article was about the national debt of the so called Garlic Countries. Not just Greece was infected with an enormous national debt and interest rate that goes sky high. No sir! Other countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and of course the most notorious ‘Garlic Country’ called Ireland have these problems as well. Europe was at the brink of an tremendous crisis (again). Just look at the infographic. All the lines in the graphics from the separate countries go sky high. The viruses in the graphic make it even more scary. You don’t need much imagination to see that the infection will soon attack France, Belgium and, god forbid, finally us! The Italian virus will of course attack Germany through Austria for Swiss is financially impenetrable.

With my heart in my throat (Dutch expression) I picked up the phone to call my stockbroker when I suddenly saw it. The graphics are manipulated. The author used the most ordinary trick in the book of deception. He stretched and clipped the Y-axes in the graphics just to make the lines more pronounced and terrifyingly steep. Ireland, Spain and Italy are no way near as worse as Greece. Only Portugal still looks horrific when you correct the Y-axe. I put down the phone and started Photoshop. This is how it looks when you keep the y-axes the same in all graphics (as one should do in this case).

Well, you still can see a small rise in the interest rates of Ireland, Spain and Italy but its not all that terrible is it? You even might wonder if the graphics of our country and Germany wouldn’t show the same little ‘hockey stick’. As a reference it wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway. Sure these countries may still very well be in a terrible shape and my prejudice towards these countries tells me that that is most likely the case but that doesn’t give the journalist the right to be that deceptive as he is now. If a company would use these methods in their annual financial report or if a stockbroker would use this “graphical technique” in a prospectus for a new stock-fund they would most likely be sued. At least I still live with the illusion that those companies would be punished by some strict governmental body that inspects these matters. (Now you can laugh at my naivety.)
What does a 49 year old passionate cynic do at such a moment? He doesn’t snitch to geenstijl.nl but he writes a letter to the editor (digitally of course, he’s not that old). With the firm belief that the editor in chief Pieter Broertjes will punish the scoundrel who wrote the article and write an answer to me where he expresses his gratitude for my correctional endeavors. By the way, I don’t blame the graphic designer for it is most likely he doesn’t know shit about these matters and just wants to make a pretty picture.

Alas they didn’t put my mail in the ‘letter to the editor’ page of the Volkskrant. But a week or two later, just when I was an illusion poorer, I received an E-mail from the author of the article. His reaction was even more appalling then his deceit. His reaction was worthy of a CDA politician caught leaving a brothel. I won’t write down the exact words because that would not be a decent thing to do (I’m pre-geenstijl) But he told me ‘That he didn’t want to deceive me and he didn’t want to express the idea that the other countries were just as bad as Greece and that he regretted it that I had the impression but that the scales were clear enough!
He ended by saying that ‘a journalist has to make choices!’ To proof him wrong I made an alternative.

tagged with: manipulation, infographic

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