I know, I know: if you want fair and balanced reporting, don’t read Britain’s Daily Mail. Yet I persist, despite nonsense like this, because I am weak.
This particular article starts off well, showing people getting their last kicks in before the latest totalitarian bollocks from H.M. Government, in the usual Daily Mail fashion:
All well and good, and nothing puts me in a good mood like Train Smash Women (like I said, I am so weak).
However, the DM then eschews standard journalistic principle — I know, I know — and turns a general-interest piece into a study of the Chinkvirus re-emergence in Britishland. For reasons best known to themselves, they publish some scawwwwy-looking graphs with the usual crap predictions from Doom & Gloom Inc.:
…although they do have the grace to give some actual numbers:
…which of course shows that even though hospitalizations are increasing, the death rate (which is the important number) isn’t doing anything alarming.
But non-alarms don’t boost readership, so the JOTP publish two graphs which show how scawwwy things could get, only they use Spain and France — no doubt because those two countries’ experience bolsters the alarmism:
Of course, what gives this bullshit away is the way the graphs are scaled. Note that the right-hand graph (of daily fatalities) has a very fine scale, which despite the steep climb, simply means that the Spanish fatality rate has gone from much less than 1 to just over 2 deaths per million population (0.2 per hundred thousand = 2 per million), while the Frogs have gone from pretty much zero to 5 per ten million.
I don’t have access to those countries’ accident stats, but I imagine that 2 per million and 5 per 10 million respectively are rather less than the death rates from, oh, falling down stairs or drowning in a bucket of wine.
So the DM took a perfectly okay article about people getting their last unfettered drinks in, and added all that pseudo-scientific bullshit. Of course, those are really subjects for two different articles (one of the prime journo principles being: don’t try to tell two stories in a single article).
Were it not for daily pics of the skinny Amanda Holden and the not-so-skinny Kelly Brook, I’d give them up altogether.
But did I already mention how weak I am?
You’ll be reading The Currant Bun again before we know it!
(I hold my hands up, I read The Currant Bun every day – for the Horse Racing of course).
I think the Sun and the DM share reporters and photographers.
Kim,
You’ve been holding out … we readers are weak too … more pics please of Ms. Kelly Brook. She’s got curves in all the right places. Oof.
Kim
Reader from a long time ago. Always meant to subscribe again due to your amazing writing style and subject matter.
Never did.
Holden’s nipples though. That did it.
Weak you say, you don’t know weak.
Peachy!!!!
Welcome back to the Thunderdome, old son.
The really pathetic thing is that the DM often does a better job covering US news than the MSM.
That said, if you read rags like the NYT properly, you can learn a lot. That’s what Borepatch tells us; he was taught how to read Pravda back when he was a young engineer working for a Three Letter Agency:
“We were taught that there’s quite a lot of actual information that you can get from Pravda, if you know how to read it. Here from memory are some of the techniques for gleaning what is actually going on from the most famous propaganda rag in history:
“The Front Page belongs to the Party. Everything you see on the front page is the Party’s most important messaging. The more prominent the article, the more you can assume that it is pure propaganda. Front Page above-the-fold articles are nothing but propaganda.
“Most of the time there will be actual journalistic facts reported in the story. You know, the Who/What/Where/When stuff. This will in general be in articles buried inside the newspapers, and/or buried in paragraph 25 (under the assumption that most people will scan the front page and maybe the first 2 or 3 paragraphs). Our trainer essentially taught us to read Pravda backwards, starting from the end and working our way back towards the front.
“Things that really, really bother the Party will be prominently displayed. Things that really really bother the Party will be on the front page, above the fold. While this seems to contradict item #1 above, it really doesn’t. Sure, the actual contents of the article are nothing but propaganda, the information to be gleaned is that the subject is something that the Party hates.”
Is Isvestia to be read with the same principles in mind?