Accuracy is inane? Clearly!
Inane: adjective meaning silly or senseless – The Concise Oxford Dictionary
I regularly check out the Herald Sun, Melbourne’s largest newspaper (by print circulation), to amuse myself with the opinions of shock-jocks such as Andrew Bolt or Terry McCrann. My favourite for the last week was Terry McCrann’s ‘ A day of inanities ‘ for the perverse irony in its title. The two points he attempts to make are:
a) That converting from ‘international units’, such as foreign currencies, for Australian articles is inane because the figures end up looking odd. I.e. A payout of US$1 million is $A1,134,201. Whilst this precision is perhaps overkill I think it is worth recording the difference in currency at that time. When dealing with such large numbers the difference in world currency markets in the space of a year could make tens of thousands of dollars difference. This is perhaps more of a concern to real journalists whose material might be consulted beyond next month.
For example, this week a French trader has been accused of unauthorised trading causing his bank some A$8.23 billion. Now that figure is converted from Euro currency, but I do not believe that rounding a cool $230 million is an insignificant figure. Unless I get to keep the change.
b) That John Faine shouldn’t have thanked an anti-whaling activist for being in contact whist negotiating a vessel somewhere in the vicinity of Antartica. He then has a go at ‘ABC balance’ for giving a ‘softball interview’ to two activists (despite giving time to government representatives AND trying to contact a number of Japanese sources for comment). To complete the picture this column was published the day after the same newspaper couldn’t figure out that the two boats were actually from different organisations.
Sadly, I don’t think this will be the most inane piece I’ll read in 2008, however I suspect it will be the most accurately labelled.
Update: Well that didn’t last long. This imbecile is probably unbeatable.
