CNN Graphs

In his Guardian column today, Charlie Brooker says that he watched the third presidential debate live on CNN because they had a fancy graph along the bottom showing what some undecided voters thought about what the candidates were saying as they said it.

Now I haven't yet seen the third debate. It's still on my PVR, because I heard it was a little dull, and anyway, I watched the next day's Daily Show (it must be said, that there was that fantastic picture that came from that third debate).

But I did watch the second debate with accompanying graph. But after CNN had heard from all fifteen or so of their panel, they cut to their panel of uncommitted voters who we were told had contributed to that graph, and heard some of their comments. Yet, there weren't very many of them. In fact I paused my PVR and counted - there were 25.

Those lines have had a lot of coverage, and people seem to like them. But are they really the product of just 25 people? That wouldn't make them terribly statistically significant (of course we didn't get a scale either - just a general up = good and down = bad thing).

For good statistical analysis of this election, go to Pollster.com.