There are several ways to manipulate data to support the agenda you want to promote. This is possible by selecting the specific pieces of data you want to include/omit from your analysis. By showing only what you want the audience to consider, they form a bias based only on the data that is presented and this can be misleading because it doesn’t take all of the data into consideration.

Another possible way of manipulating data is by using the different ways of presenting an average, for example, the mean, median or mode of a data population. The mean is calculated by adding all the values in the data sample or population and diving the total by the number of values in the set. The median is found when lining all the values in ascending order and selecting the middle value. The mode is the frequency at which a data value occurs in a sample or population. Depending on the range of values, your mean, median and mode could display a wide range of numbers which could lead to different conclusions without given any context. In this way, selecting one way of displaying the average over another could mislead the audience into forming a conclusion. While not untrue, it takes away from the conclusion that could be created with the information as a whole.

Here’s a website outlining the different forms of averages and some of the pros/cons with each as well as when and how to use them.