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Tuesday 7 June 2011

Why main stream media is declining

The lazy bastards are padding with content ripped off from elsewhere on the internet and apparently re-written by someone who either has absolutely no knowledge of what they're writing about or is terminally clueless or both. Among the vraious Grauniad stlye tpyos* and confused misuse of similar sounding words we've had a story involving an air rifle illustrated with a picture of a shotgun and we've had a story about a bear with a picture of a wolverine, so I suppose it's no surprise that in addition to journos who know two fifths of fuck all about guns or animals there are some who know nothing about cars and wouldn't recognise a Bugatti if it parked on their foot. But end up writing something about one in a web content based filler article all the same.

Click for linky

From the still of that video clip you can probably see that the car on he left is certainly a modified Vee-Wee Beetle, but petrolheads might be looking at the car on the right and thinking that actually it doesn't look very much like a Bugatti Veyron. In actual fact it looks nothing at all like a Veyron, and this is basically because it's an American made, Lotus based, Tesla electric sports car... as several commenters as well as the fucking YouTube video this story used makes perfectly clear.

Click for biggerisation

So how did this guff about a Veyron even come into it? Because The Teletubbygraph's unnamed churnalist appears to have got this story from The Metro.
Speaking to The Metro, [designer] Olly Young, 34, said: "You can't imagine how fast it is..."
So I went and had a quick look at the original article in The Metro, and in addition to seeing the same embedded YouTube clip (rather than one that had been reloaded as the Metro equivalent of Teletubbygraph video) this is what I read:
This electric dragster, called the Black Current, would leave even the £1million Bugatti Veyron behind – the Veyron takes 2.5seconds to hit 60 – but only for a short time, as its top speed is a rather ordinary 133mph.
"Would" leave, not "did" leave a Bugatti behind, and to explain that crucial difference to the Teletubbygraph's churno we'll pay a visit to Dictionary Corner to look at one of the definitions for the word "would."
2 (expressing the conditional mood) indicating the consequence of an imagined event or situation : he would lose his job if he were identified.
• ( I would) used to give advice : I wouldn't drink that if I were you.
I would be blogging on a gold plated keyboard if I won the lottery five times in a row. He would be a porn star if he was hung like Ron Jeremy. You would have a chance of being a decent journalist if you began writing your own stories. See? So in this instance the VW would beat a Veyron if there had been one there for it to race, but there wasn't so it didn't. Full marks to Unnamed Journo for not simply copying and pasting the whole article, but since he or she either didn't bother to read the original or failed to comprehend the important detail that the Veyron beating ability has not actually been put to a real world test they avoided outright copying only to bastardise the story instead.



* With the obvious exception of 'Grauniad' I found it was actually more effort to get those words wrong.
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