Real Examples of Misleading Statistics

In 2018 WWF published the Living Planet Report. This report was widely misinterpreted, and many newspapers reported something along the lines of a 60% reduction in wildlife since 1970 without giving a more detailed (or correct) explanation.

WWF ellaborated how their numbers were obtained in a technical supplement to their report. They write:

"Does the trend in the global LPI mean we have lost 60% of all animals? Although the LPI uses time-series of either population size, density, abundance or a proxy of abundance, the overall trend calculated represents an average trend in population change and not an average of total numbers of individual animals or species lost."

They even give an illustrated example, found below, which I have edited slightly to make more compact.