Fox News's Benjamin Hall, reporting from London this morning, sdiscussed
the Coronavirus in Europe, giving all lengths in meters: 2, 100, 500,
with no translation. Hall himself is British.
Fox News in the United States carried the report with no changes. I
believe that this is another example of what I call the "laziness factor."
It is just too hard to translate these measurements into non-metric units
in a live report, especially with the rate at which news updates are
coming these days. Thus, the press just leaves the metric units
untranslated.
I have noticed this phenomenon in the print media too. Many reports are
now coming from international sources. Because these reports are used not
only in the United States, but worldwide, the metric units remain
unchanged, and the American public becomes more used to hearing them.
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