I hope that Martin Morrison’s suggestion that international news and sport will promote acceptance of metric measurements is correct. The situation at present does not look promising.
The media news and sports coverage tries to airbrush the metric system out of the picture as much as possible. In the Olympics for instance, weights lifted are converted to pounds for American audiences, and distances jumped or thrown are all converted to feet and inches. Actually, they are converted to feet and decimals of feet, as no-one there either knows how to convert to inches, or is willing to put in the effort. The only metric units used are the names of some of the events, as it would look silly to refer to the 109-yard dash. I am sure the Olympics coverage in 2016 will be the same. A few years ago the SPEED motor sport network broadcast an Australian classic car race, the Bathurst 1000. (1000 km. It got an upgrade from being the Bathurst 500 (miles) when Australia went metric.) As the article in the link tells us, the American broadcasting crew went to great lengths to convert all the on-screen news and statistics to US customary units. http://www.crash.net/v8/news/173044/1/waltrip-joins-us-tv-coverage-of-bathurst-1000.html <http://www.crash.net/v8/news/173044/1/waltrip-joins-us-tv-coverage-of-bathurst-1000.html> Three people commented on the planned broadcast, two of them saying that the network should have kept the metric units. These comments got four upvotes from readers and two downvotes, so this could show a modest amount of support for metric units. I’m happy to hear that the Golf Channel is setting an example by accepting metric units and I hope this practice spreads to the rest of the US media. Regards, Peter Goodyear
