You’d be surprised how often you spot this kind of thing, generally in The Sun (if you happen to be someone who’s slightly obsessive about graphs and charts and stuff and who flicks through all the papers each morning that is).

This is from the Times on the Saturday 23rd June:

At first glance a fairly innocuous piece of information graphics with quite a lot of distracting noise but you know not terrible. But on closer inspection…

Which is so far removed from an accurate pie chart of those figures …

… that it discredits all the other illustrations and, for me, seriously throws into question the rest of the article. I mean the most charitable explanation is that the people who produced the pie chart and the people who signed off the illustration are incompetent or lazy. But surely these are generated with some software, the designers don’t need to calculate and measure each angle so is it deliberate?

On a tangent, it’s interesting to note that the smoking figures for the UK adults population are (from memory) at something like 23%.