Floods of sloppy reporting
Last Thursday, 13 January, I bought a copy of The Independent , because it had six full pages on the floods in Brisbane, Australia, the city where my daughters live. I learned nothing about the floods that I didn’t already know, but something about the deterioration of newspaper standards. The six pages read like copy churned out by harassed and uninterested journalists instructed at short notice by the editor to fill the space. Better reporting, with fewer blunders, could have been done by a single person with an hour available, an internet connection, and a desire to check and question...