> More than a few people at CNN signed off on this before airing to the world.

I always had the impression that a lot of this kind of stuff is produced in a hurry, not infrequently by lowly paid interns and the like. Especially if there's a news item just 30 minutes before airing time you got to race to produce this and there isn't really time for a proper signing-off procedure.

You don't reverse an axis by accident.

How do you know? Could just be a screw-up in the software they used to generate it somehow; i.e. they filled in the labels in the wrong order, were in a hurry, and no one noticed in time. I didn't even notice it originally.

That was my point (I mean, how many people must consider their readers that stupid to post a chart like this?)

> I mean, how many people must consider their readers that stupid to post a chart like this?

Apparently CNN.