Newsnight’s Fake News Graph Punishes Honesty

Newsnight made a lot out of an incredible statistic: that the UK had more deaths yesterday than the entire EU. The problem is the numbers are nonsense. The FT has exposed reporting on the continent to be littered with “flawed data”…

In fact some of the data in foreign countries is so dodgy that, according to the FT’s data guru John Burn-Murdoch, if England had adopted Spain’s new ‘method’, it would have reported just 20 new deaths yesterday. England is equivalent to 13% of the population of the EU, and yet would appear to have just 6% of the death rate, if it adopted Spain’s manipulated reporting…

Newsnight is supposed to provide analysis that goes behind the headlines, did no one at Newsnight not think the data was suspect? Was it just “too good to check” and they just preferred the Twitter buzz…

UPDATE: Newsnight sourced its data from controversial website ‘Worldometer‘, a website that even  Wikipedia editors have decided to avoid. The Data Manager for independent statistics website Our World In Data told CNN that “We think people should be wary, especially media, policy-makers and decision-makers. This data is not as accurate as they think it is.” Take note, Newsnight…

* This article was originally published by Guido Fawkes