Charles Apple | American Copy Editors Society

Fox News needs a copy editor… quite frankly, to keep their chartmaking graphics folks honest.

Take, for example, this unemployment bar chart that aired Monday.

You can see how flat the curve is, especially over the past few months. Not much “change,” right? You can just imagine the fun folks on the Fox news desk are having with this.

One little problem, though. Check out the actual number values listed. Yep, the November number is actually down to 8.6 percent. Although Fox charted it as if the value was the same as October, which was 9.0 percent.

If you accurately graph that last value, it turns this chart…

…into this one.

Not great. But considerably better for the president than the Fox chart would have you believe.

Now, the left-side scale on that original chart is way off, too, making even my revision look, in fact, a little off. So let’s just graph it all from scratch, shall we?

Again, here is the original from Fox News…

And here is my version.

Hmm. No matter how you stack it, wrong is wrong.

Shame on Fox News. Once again.

Thanks to my anonymous source for tipping me off.

While I was backtracking this chart, I found a wonderful tool over at Google that I didn’t know about before: Public Data. Among the numbers you can find — and chart — there: Unemployment data going back to before 1950.

And yes, the 2011 data matches the data Fox used in its chart, if not the chart itself. So we’re comparing apples to apples here.

Now, using the knobs at the bottom, you can narrow the data down to whatever range of years you want. An interesting thing happens when you look at unemployment just since 2004, which the year Bush was re-elected:

Can you see it? No? Let me overlay a little help for you…

So yeah: I’m a little surprised that folks at Fox would say something like: “unemployment has gone up precipitously since [Obama] took office.” Especially since…

1. Unemployment was well on its way to going up precipitously while Bush was still in office. And…
2. Unemployment is within four tenths of a percentage point of being back down to where it was in February 2009, Obama’s first full month in office.

I continue to be amazed that Fox gets away with this stuff.

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You know who else needs a copy editor?

Local TV news operations. Chicago’s WMAQ-TV in particular. And Harrisburg’s Fox43 TV news. And Local 15 News in Mobile, Ala. And WBAL-TV in Baltimore. And Fox2Now in St. Louis. And KTLA channel 5 in Los Angeles. And Charlotte’s WBTV. And other local TV news operations. And CBS local media. And the web operation for DC101 radio. And the Huffington Post. And CNN and CNN Money and CNN mobile and Fox News (and Fox News again) and ABC News and the BBC and German news channel N24. And Martha Stewart’s TV operation. And the Disney Channel. And creators of mobile apps. And Google News’ ‘bots. And Baseball jersey manufacturers. And Georgetown University. And Kansas State University. And the University of Iowa. And the New York Jets, the Minnesota Vikings, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals (boy, do they need a copy editor). And the National Hockey League. And ESPN (and ESPN again) and Fox Sports (and Fox Sports again). And college athletic department ticket offices. And the Virginia general assembly. And college alumni magazines. And pharmacies. And the makers of Sudafed. And Borders bookstore. And the U.S. Postal Service. And government agencies and political candidates. And Tea Party candidates. And the White House. And city and county Boards of Elections. Both the state of Pennsylvania and its department of transportation. And Pittsburgh skywriters. And road paving contractors. And the city of Norfolk, Va. And the Ohio Dept. of Transportation. And South African traffic cops. And gas stations. And billboard companies. And sign painters. And Home Depot and manufacturers of “hoodies.” And Dollar Tree. And T-shirt designers. And more T-shirt designers. And Old Navy. And rubber stamp designers. And glass etchers. And Starbucks. And restaurants, breakfast joints, Chinese restaurants and cake decorators. And more cake decorators. And drive-in movie theater managers. And romance novelists. And South Africa’s New Age and Sunday Independent newspapers. And Dublin’s Sunday Business Post. And the Echo of Gloucestershire, England. And the South China Morning Post. And the Washington Post (Hey! Another repeat offender!), the Post‘s Express tab (Hey! Yet another repeat offender!), the Washington Examiner, the New York Times (Wow! Yet another repeat offender!)(Hey! A third offense!), the New York Post, Wall Street Journal Europe, Newsday, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times (And yet another!), the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat & Chronicle, the Seattle Times, the weekly Manila Mail of San Francisco, the Miami Herald (and again!), the Portland Oregonian, the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun, the Chapel Hill, N.C., News, the Missoula, Mont., Missoulian, the Times-Record of Denton, Md., the News-Herald of Willoughby, Ohio, the Amarillo (Texas) Globe News, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Waynesboro News Virginian, the Virginian-Pilot, the Des Moines Register, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Gannett’s N.Y. Central Media hub, the Greenville (S.C.) News, the Daily Herald of Provo, Utah, the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinoisian, the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger (Hey! Yet another repeat offender!) and the Canarsie Courier of New York City. And the Associated Press. And Mann’s Jeweler’s Accent magazine. And Investment News magazine. And Time magazine.