If You Want To Be Strictly Accurate...

An interesting phenomenon which becomes apparent when being an established blogger is the nature of the readership - it never fails to amaze who actually reads the bog. Despite being dismissed as "electronic version of pub gossip", bloggers can sometimes make a real difference.

With this in mind it's interesting that for the first time this blog has had readership from the European Parliament. Since my previous post was published yesterday on why a 2015 EU referendum cannot happen the hit rate from the EU Parliament has been very significant.

It's hard to pin down influence of course, but sometimes media reports which belatedly begin to write about very familiar themes in similar language can be difficult to explain away as mere coincidences.

An example would be in a piece in today's Telegraph; 11 things we've learned about Jeremy Clarkson. The piece relates to Top Gear's Stig delivering a petition to the BBC's London headquarters to call for the return of the show's host, Jeremy Clarkson, while being transported on this - pictured below:

The vehicle is virtually identical to the one which was used during a protest outside the UKIP Spring Conference in Margate back in February:

It was universally described as a tank, however as EUReferendum noted:

If one wonders just how naff the Daily Mail can become, one just needs to visit the headline of their piece on the Ukip spring conference in Margate. There, we are told, the Ukipites were "gatecrashed" by "NAZI dancing troupe goose-stepping through Margate in front of a Second World War tank".

Notwithstanding any other errors, the vehicle in question is not a tank – it is an Abbot FV433 self-propelled gun. And it is not of World War II vintage. It was actually introduced into British Army service in 1965. I remember it well as, about that time, I was nearly flattened by one when it came hurtling down a track on which we had pitched our tent (don't ask).

Therefore and rather interestingly half way down Telegraph piece today, we have this by the author of the piece Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor:

A man dressed as Top Gear's Stig has delivered the petition to the BBC's London headquarters in a tank (or self-propelled artillery, if you want to be strictly accurate).

This provokes two interesting observations. One that given the media as a whole have described it as tank, that Anita Singh acknowledges accurately it might be something else such as self-propelled artillery - of where there is only one source to report this - suggests strongly blogs are read.

The second is the dismissive tone of describing self-propelled artillery as "if you want to be strictly accurate". These are two completely different types of military vehicle.

To give an analogy, in the spirit of Clarkson and Top Gear, we could say that the car pictured below is obviously a Mercedes-AMG GT which has 4.0-litre V8 biturbo and produces 462hp. This allows it to achieve 0-60 mph in as little as 3.8 seconds.

But of course "if you want to be strictly accurate" we would note the picture is actually one of an Enzo Ferrari.

What a good example that is of a newspaper publicly acknowledging that "being strictly accurate" is an optional extra.