Since the dawn of time, or birth of Rupert Murdoch (which is essentially the same thing), man has harboured a healthy scepticism towards the British national press.
Personally, I would class myself as having a slightly unhealthy level of scepticism towards it, but even I, when left to my own devices (by which I mean iPhone), am highly likely to be mindlessly scrolling through the feeds of various UK media publications and digesting the contents without a shred of reflection or analysis. Unfortunately, I feel I am not alone in this. Although we all know that we should maintain a level of mistrust towards the authenticity of information upon which many news stories are constructed, we largely take what we read at face value.
I am here to tell you a cautionary tale. It is a tale of the very instance that I moved from sceptical to completely unbelieving when it comes to the validity of the British press, in the hope that it will reveal the ludicrous internal workings of journalism today.
This is the tale of the time I was the source of a major news ‘story’.
It all began one fateful day last year, during my time as a content writer for a small digital agency. I was working on what will seem a fairly innocuous project - a graphic laden, lighthearted article illustrating iconic modes of transport in cities around the world. What could go wrong?
Well, in order to ensnare maximum curious readers though juicy, vacuous clickbait, it was suggested that we include for each mode of transport a ‘price per mile’. As head researcher, it fell to me to gather this data.
I don’t feel I can express, through the power of language alone, just how deeply I struggle with even the most rudimentary mathematical concepts. For me, times-tables are only of interest if displaying public transport schedules, and Pythagoras is nothing more than a bloke who was bang into triangles. Suffice to say, I was not overly comfortable with my newfound role as data analyst, but in the absence of any offers of help, I ploughed on.
Fast forward three days, and I could be found slumped across my desk, surrounded by post-it notes of varying hues, each bearing complex-looking formulae and arrows to further post-it notes, empty coffee cups, and at least five calculators. My hands and arms were covered in numerical biro etchings, some of which were imprinted across my forehead where I had fallen asleep on them. I had sources upon sources upon sources, which were cross-referenced with forums, reddit threads, and the fourth pages of obscure comments sections. You may be thinking that this all sounds like the scene of some pretty thorough research. But trust me when I say I had literally no idea what I was doing. Like those dogs that fly aeroplanes.
Somehow though, I ended up with a price for each mode of transport. Even if none of them had any hope of standing up to even the most basic of verification processes. The real trouble began after I had uncovered about the 7,894th stumbling block in my research, which was the following:
A London bus charges a minimum of £1.50 to simply get on it. This is the absolute smallest amount of money one can pay to use it. However, one could legitimately, if having picked the right bus, ride from one side of the city to the other on that £1.50 (thus covering a vast amount of miles). So should I claim £1.50 as the price per mile of a London bus, or should I divide the price by these possible miles, and arrive at a much smaller, technically accurate but not practically possible figure?
I brought this ethical dilemma to my manager, in the hope he would guide me down the path of righteousness rather than controversy. He did not.
A few days later, we were met with the following headlines:
Daily Mail
Evening Standard
That’s right - my maths, MY MATHS, had become national news. It was in print across multiple well-known publications, waiting to make a million Londoners blindly livid with its blatant erroneousness. It was even a trending Twitter hashtag.
My point is simply this: when the source of a major news story is solely ME WITH A CALCULATOR, you can be pretty sure that the British press has a fairly laissez-faire approach to fact-checking. Just a little thought for the day.