Entertainment For Lively Minds
The 60 Wives of Henry the Eightieth
According to The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, FC Barcelona beat Manchester United 20-0 in last season's Champions League Final, Usain Bolt smashed the world record by running 100 metres in under a second (0.96 seconds, to be precise), and Moscow is 155 miles from London.
Can you imagine those three newspapers - three of the four "quality" daily broadsheets - all printing any such thing on the same day? Yet that's exactly what happened yesterday, when the three of them were one order or magnitude out when they claimed that Bono had called at the Tory conference for 7% of the British GDP to be allocated to international aid projects.
I'm not an economist. Indeed, I only scraped through "O"-level maths, so I'm barely numerate, but it was obvious even to me that something was squiffy with that figure. If Britain's tax revenue - the government's kitty, basically - is 35-40% of the GDP, then 7% of the GDP would be about one fifth of that kitty.
The Prime Minister addresses the nation: "Bad news for British schools and hospitals, I'm afraid, but they'll have to close. All of them. A diminutive Irishman in stupid sunglasses has bagged their entire budget."
How is it possible for (presumably) three sub-editors on three of the best (allegedly) four newspapers in the country to have missed something so (patently) obvious? Would this have happened before the Internet was the default tool for fact-checking? Is it just a consequence of the death of real reporting of which David Simon, among others, has warned? Am I alone in giving a damn about things like this? Should I just shut up and watch the cagefighting?
(The Independent, amazingly, got it right.)
- More from Archie Valparaiso.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Not just sub-editing
I work in computers, for an engineering company. Throughout my career I've been surprised by people who have a casual relationship with numbers, who wouldn't see a big difference between 7% and 0.7% . Maybe that's because for the last 25 years I've been playing with numbers in my head as part of my job, and generating rough estimates to check calculations presented to me. Even in the worlds of computing & engineering, the basic maths skills seem to be taught less than when I was a pupil.
Although the situation you refer to won't be helped by the serious pruning of staff that has been going on with subs and all newspaper production staff over the last few years.
Is it another victim of the decline of arithmetic?
We were in a very posh pub in Yorkshire the other day. We ordered three and a half pints of their equally posh micro-brewed bitter, one pint of Guinness and half of cider. Because the electronic till wasn't working, the guy wrote our orders down on a piece of paper. "That'll be eleven pounds ten," he said.
£2.22 a pint
no wonder you've been ill.
It's not just here
Try this recording of a Verizon (American mobile phone company) customer service rep failing to understand the difference between $0.002 and 0.002 cents. (The rest of the blog is worth perusing too.
That's amazing
But why doesn't he explain it as a fraction?
'Flat Earth News' by Nick Davies
This 'decline of journalism' book (no wait, come back) spends quite a lot of time on 'churnalism' - widely documented syndrome of journalists with no time to check or research subjects simply placing supplied content into papers.
I recommend the book, but it is horrifying.
I'll second that.
It's a great book. I've got another one of his upstairs somewhere I've not read yet.
Aside from this, I still can't quite grasp the link between Conservative policies and a shortarsed Irish egomaniacal rockstar. Wearing stupid sunglasses.