Lessons in Bad Charting: Gawker Edition

The following chart on Gawker using Nielsen data tries to show "which sites are the most liberal, and conservative":

It's a nice idea and does give a general sense of the liberal-conservative gradient, but it's also very misleading. The first impression is that the overall audience for these sites is heavily conservative but the fine print reveals that that's inaccurate. Nick Denton writes:

"The blue bars represent the proportion of the site's audience who declare themselves to be liberal or very liberal; the red bars represent conservative, moderate and undeclared."

Why on earth someone would lump in conservative with moderate and undeclared is a mystery to me (and this commenter). Denton needs to replot this -- perhaps with one more colored section comprised of moderates and undecideds, or two more colored sections if the moderates and undecideds exhibit interesting patterns of their own -- to give a more accurate picture of web sites' audiences.

(Graci Ryan Schick)