The State of The Guardian's SOTU Infographic Is...Dumber
Dumb and Dumber The GuardianThis chart tells you that "the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined" over time. The problem is, it's wrong. Yesterday, as a run-up to Obama's State of the Union address, The Guardian published an interactive infographic called "The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined." The chart plotted the reading level of every SOTU address since the country's founding along a timeline. Each bubble represents a single speech, with the height of the bubble indicating grade level, and the bubble's size indicating speech length. With the exception of a few outliers--Madison blew everyone away in 1815 with a speech targeted for an audience in grade 25.3; Lincoln delivered an address in 1862 of exceptionally low standard--the trend is indeed clear: the annual State of the Union had gotten progressively dumber over time. Pretty scary,...