I probably don’t need to caution anyone that the media loves to spin a tall tale. This month’s Wall Street crisis is prime fodder for the media’s spin doctors. A picture tells a thousand stories and they can tell a thousadn lies too. Take a look at this graph from the Guardian in the UK.

From Phil Gyford’s blog:

"We can see every little peak and trough. But it also looks as though by 14:30 the average was around one-fifth of the opening price — stocks had lost 80% of their value! Of course, they hadn’t. In reality they’d “only” lost around 9% of their value. Unless one is going to examine the y-axis and mentally imagine the bottom of the graph (which, in this case, would have extended off the bottom of the page by nearly a metre) the graph completely misrepresents the day’s activity. It lies."