Lance Stokes

With this critique, I want to wade into deep waters by attempting to defend a stacked bar chart. It's generally believed that stacked bar charts should be used sparingly, if at all. But this one has real merit. It's important that the absolute number of stories on each of the 3 news channels is not critical to telling the story; rather, I want to be able to make relative comparisons from one channel to another. For example, CNN clearly did more stories than Fox during the observed period. This is surprising, and communicates information that I didn't have. Further, this chart makes it clear that Trump and Bush's respective total number of stories dwarfs the last four candidates' numbers.

However, I do not like the color choices for this viz. The MSNBC green color is a regrettable choice, and all the colors could be more muted. Additionally, I would have thought that Fox would've been given a red shade while CNN might've been blue, given their generally held political inclinations. But I like the decision not to put a border around the legend- it works great to have it along the top edge.

But this chart does a great job of showing why horizontal bars are easy to read and make comparisons

I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed Lance Stokes