Must Zero Be Included on Scales of Graphs? Another Look at Fox News' Graph and Huff's Gee-Whiz Graph

My August 4th post calls a graph from Fox News misleading since it is a bar graph with a non-zero baseline. The blog Fallacy Files credits my post as a source for its entry on graphs with no zero on the scale.  I take issue, however, with their title.  The post is entitled “A ‘Gee-Whiz’ Graph,” borrowing a term coined by Darrell Huff in his classic little book How to Lie with Statistics.  The problem is that Huff's "Gee-Whiz Graph"--a graph that deceives since it's missing zero on the scale--is generally a line graph, such as in Figures 1 and 2 below, but the graph from Fox News was a bar graph.  This may seem like a minor point, but it is in fact quite significant.  I disagree with Huff that all graphs require a zero baseline; line graphs do not always require one.  (I should mention here that with the exception of the Gee-Whiz chapter, I am in fact a big fan of most of Huff's book!)