The nonsense of La Sexta with the graphics

“Data kills narrative!”, exclaimed Javier Ruiz, editorial director of the new channel La Séptima on the day of its premiere. But this is an empty mantra, with the same truth as “Cat crushes duck with a cheap shoe”, because just because something rhymes doesn’t make it any truer, Bertha. The first impressions of the new channel have already been written by comrade Mònica Planas, with her usual precise scalpel. I only want to point out the intensive use of electoral polls: every night, the channel presents a tracking that presumably captures the moment, as if voters en masse thought one thing on Monday and something very different the next day. On the debut night, Ruiz said that media polls seek more to shape reality than to describe it. And that his –in which, oh surprise, the PSOE was winning–, on the other hand, was indeed accurate. The favored party rushed to retweet it, of course. But the viewer had no resources to evaluate its reliability. At least El País, for example, has the good habit of offering the data in the raw, in case someone wants to try to unravel the cooking that has been applied to them.

The problem, apart from the act of faith, is that the presentation of the tracking was clumsy and misleading. Only seven tenths of a percent of voting intention separated the PSOE and the PP, according to their very adventurous numbers, and yet the red bar was ostensibly longer than the blue one. The minimum that can be asked of a medium that claims to champion rigor is that the graphs be proportional. In the case of Vox, on the other hand, the green bar was much higher than it should have been, suggesting that Abascal’s party was about to catch up with the popular ones. The Broad Front was also oversized in relation to its percentage (and, perhaps to pay homage to the party’s name, it had a thicker bar). A nonsense from an informative point of view that indicates contempt for the data. Or, as they might say, the bar causes a jar, and the opinion ties you up.