Literacy and Numeracy
Is it me, or does the Guardian have a tabloid-like obsession with pushing up the number of casualties whenever disaster strikes? See Aid arrives as death toll nears 40,000, for example. Yesterday, the figure on their site was 30,000. Thirty. Thousand. This morning, they've found another 10,000 dead bodies from somewhere.
The dateline on this story from the BBC is Tuesday 11 October. That's today. And the BBC figure, as it was yesterday, is 20,000. That's twenty. Thousand. Fewer. Dead bodies than the Guardian have managed to find.
I've noticed this tendency with the Guardian to - exaggerate? - inflate? - make up? - figures before. The responsible way to report things like this is to say, "unknown at this time" or "estimated in the thousands". Because they do not and cannot possibly know. Perhaps this is related to their adopting the so-called "Berliner" format for the printed version of the newspaper. "Berliner" is a posh way of saying "tabloid."
In related news, it was gratifying to hear the representative of the UK Pakistan-Kashmiri community on the radio yesterday morning managing, in the midst of a national tragedy on such an immense scale, stay "on-message" with regard to the language he was using.
Pakistan administered Kashmir, he was saying. Indian occupied Kashmir, he was adding. Lest we forget, eh? We've lost most of a generation of school children, but let's do make sure the surviving ones don't forget to hate their neighbours.
The dateline on this story from the BBC is Tuesday 11 October. That's today. And the BBC figure, as it was yesterday, is 20,000. That's twenty. Thousand. Fewer. Dead bodies than the Guardian have managed to find.
I've noticed this tendency with the Guardian to - exaggerate? - inflate? - make up? - figures before. The responsible way to report things like this is to say, "unknown at this time" or "estimated in the thousands". Because they do not and cannot possibly know. Perhaps this is related to their adopting the so-called "Berliner" format for the printed version of the newspaper. "Berliner" is a posh way of saying "tabloid."
In related news, it was gratifying to hear the representative of the UK Pakistan-Kashmiri community on the radio yesterday morning managing, in the midst of a national tragedy on such an immense scale, stay "on-message" with regard to the language he was using.
Pakistan administered Kashmir, he was saying. Indian occupied Kashmir, he was adding. Lest we forget, eh? We've lost most of a generation of school children, but let's do make sure the surviving ones don't forget to hate their neighbours.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
2 Comments:
Utter nonsense - it's not the Guardian "finding" the bodies, it's the authorities making estimates based on what they find in a difficult, catastrophic situation. The BBC tends to be more conservative because it's terrified of making judgements after the Hutton enquiry - witness their hopeless July 7 coverage when they insisted - wrongly - it was a power surge causing the "incidents" long after every other major news outlet, including the Guardian, had called it for what it was: terrorism. Time will prove that the Guardian's figures for this death toll are, again, more accurate than those from the BBC. What would you rather have: truth now from the people on the ground, or truth deferred until an editor in west London gets "proof"?
By
Anonymous, at 8:15 am
I can promise you that people - by a huge majority - don't want to wait to find out what happens, and want to find things out now. This can be done with a good degree of accuracy, and that accuracy can mean more than just selling newspapers - it can change political and public reactions to a disaster, for instance. I'm not arguing that's a motivation, of course, but it certainly can be the effect.
The question should be: why is the BBC so slow, given its enormous state funding?
By
Anonymous, at 8:30 am
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