Carleton-- Tucker Carlson's comment is at best a personal opinion or, as
one of the commentors here indicated, maybe said with tongue in cheek.
Perhaps you have not seen the Carlson program or other programs on
FoxNews, so you might not have a good sense of the channel as a whole.
I have sent to this list over the past few years several examples of
FoxNews's increasing use of the metric system. FoxNews is an
international news service, and it so receives and broadcasts a
significant number of its reports from overseas, where the metric system
is used exclusively.
Many of these international reports do include unconverted metric units:
meters, kilometers, kilograms, etc. I heard several of these used in the
reporting of the D-Day events yesterday.
As I have written here before, I think that we shall see a continuing
gradual increase in the use of metric units in news broadcasting simply
because the stations are too hurried to convert the units. Moreover,
there is a gradually increasing acceptance of the metric system here.
Yes, there is still the small group of anti-metricians, but most in the
U.S. have voiced no objection to liquid measures in liters and
milliliters, lumens in light bulbs, and milligrams in pharmaceuticals.
Even candy bars are now being advertised in centimeters. It is only when
the issue becomes politicized that one hears objections raised.
I don't watch CNN or MS-NBC, but I suspect that those channels may be
worse than FoxNews in metric usage. It used to be that in the U.S. the
Democrats were more pro metric, but I don't think that this is the case
any longer. The Democrats came down very hard on Governor Chafee, a 2016
Presidential candidate, who promoted the metric system. I suspect that at
this time more Republicans probably favor the metric system because of its
use in international commerce. They are making the coversions in business
products with little fanfare, flying "under the radar." It is
regrettable, but probably necessary, for them to have to do it this way.
Martin Morrison
Columnist, "Metric Today"
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