Reporters in the US take all kinds of liberties in reporting and the use of
metric and conversion is not an exception. Moreover, reporters are not very
talented in math so it's an added error factor as you all describe.
Stan Doore
----- Original Message -----
From: John M. Steele
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2009 1:20 PM
Subject: [USMA:45575] Re: corrupted metric data
I'm surprised she left any metric in the story. The AP Style Guide is
to convert all metric to Customary and only use the Customary, unless the
metric values are "important to the story" (which they don't define very well.
They are essentially in denial about the rest of the world being
metric. They convert Olympic records, numerical values which are part of the
laws of other countries, etc. Many of the things they convert to Customary, in
my opinion, meet the standard of the metric value being important.
If it is a foreign news story and involves numbers, get it from a
foreign news source. (AFP is metric-primary, Reuters tends to be dual, and AP
tends to be Customary-primary)
Of course, wind and rainfall vary widely over the coverage area of a
hurricane. They should of course use the official values recorded by China,
but there are probably places a kilometer away where their values are accurate.
--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Simon_Meng <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Simon_Meng <[email protected]>
Subject: [USMA:45574] corrupted metric data
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Date: Monday, August 10, 2009, 12:34 PM
Please reference this article on Yahoo news:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090810/ap_on_re_as/as_asia_storm
Then notice this sentence:
Morakot, meaning emerald in Thai, slammed into China's Fujian
province Sunday afternoon carrying heavy rain and winds of 74 miles (119
kilometers) per hour, according to the China Meteorological Administration.
If you play the video, you are linked to an ABC news video. When the
ABC video ends, a CBC video begins to play. The Canadian reporter when giving
any measurements uses metric only and gives the wind speed as 120 km/h.
So how did 120 km/h become 119 km/h in the article? It seems Anne
Huang, author of the article must have converted the 120 km to 74.56 miles,
rounded it to 74 miles and the reconverted it back and rounded it to 119 km.
How often does metric data get corrupted this way and what can be
done to stop it?
Notice this sentence:
Typhoon Morakot dumped up to 80 inches (two meters) of rain on some
communities.......
It sounds like the Canadian reporter says the rainfall was 2900 mm
then says that is over 2 m. Anne Huang, author of the article somehow missed
the extra 900 mm, which would make the rainfall closer to 3 m.
Are these types of errors common with AP reporters? I can see why
they don't leave an email address to contact them, as they would get flooded
with messages pointing out their constant errors.
Simon
