Don't commit a graphics Fox - er, faux - pas!

One more reason why it’s important to remember that with all the cool stuff you can do with graphics these days, you can’t forget that it is still JOURNALISM that information graphics are supposed to achieve — one of the major tenets of which is VERIFICATION. Yet another lesson we can learn from Fox News, given its recent faux pas of a map of Japan’s nuclear reactors … and a nightclub. Fox News mistakenly identified the nightclub in Shibuya, Tokyo, the “Shibuya Eggman”, as nuclear reactor “Shibuyaeggman."

But Fox News isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last to commit fact errors in graphics. Take this mistake from the graphics department of the WGN during the 2010 World Cup, for example. Apparently, someone confused the country of South Africa, host to the World Cup, with the continent of South America. Ouch. You would think that a copy editor would have caught this sort of thing before publication, but sometimes time constraints can affect the editorial process, allowing errors to slip in. This illustrates one of the first elements of designing infographics as described in an article by Daniel Dejarnette titled "Looks Aren't Everything," and that is: it's still the graphic artist's responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the graphic.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/15/fox-news-japan-map-nightclub-nuclear_n_835840.html