A prominent Republican went on CNN Thursday to defend his use of a misleading chart about Planned Parenthood. Earlier this week, I wrote about the chart that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, displayed during a congressional hearing over funding for the organization:
GOP congressman doubles down on comically misleading Planned Parenthood chart
As I pointed out, this isn’t how charts work. Because 935,573 is larger than 327,000, the pink line should be a lot higher than the red line. Done properly, the chart would look something like this:
(Javier Zarracina/Vox)
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer challenged Chaffetz on this, saying that “it makes it look like there’s a whole lot more abortions than there are cancer screenings, whereas there’s three times as many cancer screenings as there are abortions.”
But Chaffetz didn’t back down. “The numbers were exactly accurate,” he said. “I stand by the numbers. I can understand where people would say that arrows went in different directions, but the numbers were accurate.”
It’s true that the numbers were accurate, but that’s still not how charts work.
