History Main / LiesDamnedLiesAndStatistics

* ''Series/TheWire'': A major theme in the series is how organizations will "juke the stats" to make it look like the organization is more successful than it is. The police department will downgrade crimes when filing them to make the crime rate look like it's going down, or start focusing on low-level, trivial arrests to make the conviction rates go up. When Prez gets a job as a teacher, he immediately notices the same tricks being done in standardized testing to make it look like students are performing better. Reality plays almost no part in what the stats suggest.

Statistics are like studies: who made them and who paid them matters a lot. Want to "prove" that [[MurderSimulators video games cause violence]]? Get a group of scientists that are already savvy about this and don't mind the lack of ethics. Have them draw from a very small pool of test subjects that are known to display violent behavior. Mental hospitals, prisons, schools for children with behavior disorders, what have you. Do some generic tests that are guaranteed to show up positive, come up with numbers, and presto, instant headline. "Recent test shows 77% of subjects become more violent after playing ''Franchise/MortalKombat''." Most people won't bother with reading the article the whole way through and will just look at the headline. This works with anything from [[UsefulNotes/TheComicsCode comic books]] and rock to watching ''Film/BrokebackMountain'' or voting for specific parties, basically anything. See PushPolling for a specific form of this.

See also NineOutOfTenDoctorsAgree, which is much a sub trope to this, and AbsoluteComparative, where the use of statistics is avoided entirely by comparing the product to nothing. Subtrope of LyingByOmission, where the omission is the context of the statistics.

** Ancel Keys deliberately messed with his research to "prove" the lipid hypothesis, throwing out more than half the countries he examined because their data did not fit his pet theory that animal fats are bad for human health (despite humans having evolved to eat fruit and meat, not grains). For instance, Chile ate little fat but got a lot of heart disease, while Norway and Holland ate a lot of fat but got little heart disease. He was not the only one who deliberately messed with the data, either.

[[caption-width-right:350:Not shown: Bunk, bupkis, malarky, cockamamie.]]

-->-- '''Homer Simpson''', ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' ("Homer the Vigilante")

* Programs on Creator/AnimalPlanet are fond of citing how Americans spend more money annually on cat or dog food than on baby food. This is depicted as evidence that Americans pamper their pets like babies but overlooks several facts: that pets eat pet food for their entire lives, whereas babies only eat baby food for about a year and a half, and that many families have more than one pet at a time, but relatively few have more than one child of an age to eat baby food at the same time. Also, a baby might consume free breast milk from the mother which wouldn't show up in the statistics when calculating the cost of baby food, or parents who make their own baby food.