A lovely christmas story!

[brkl]

KING

ALFRED

IS

DEAD

Oh wow.

[SignorSuperdouche]

There are so many priceless headlines there I'd love to quote them all, but I'd like to draw particular attention to this one:

MYSTERY OF WHEELCHAIR LEFT IN SHOREHAM PUB

Now I've left jackets, wallets, phones etc in pubs before, but how drunk do you have to be to forget your fucking wheelchair.

[Scrobbs]

Drunk enough to forget you can't walk. [/benefit fraud]

[DanJW]

There's a good joke along those lines, about a guy that makes friends with another guy in the pub, they both get very drunk and he offers to help him get home. He finds he can't walk, puts it down to drunkeness since they guy can't talk by this point either, and so drags him to the address in his wallet. Wife at the door comments on him forgetting his wheelchair again.

It's the way you tell 'em.

[Nick]

Wow, you totally annihilated that joke Dan.

[DanJW]

There didn't seem much point in telling it properly, since the punchline was already known.

In any case the real life event is easily explained by an able-bodied person transporting a wheelchair for some reason, perhaps for a disabled relative or because it needed to be returned to the hospital after they got better. Person stops off at the pub instead, forgets about it. It doesn't seem that big of a mystery to me.

I'm full of fun today, I am

[Scrobbs]

[Chris]

Anyway, the BBC pretty much rules, as far as I can tell. I don't have a TV connection anymore but I watched election night on TV while on holidays, and we kept flicking the channels between Sky News, CNN and BBC. The attitude of the BBC was really restrained and professional. Sometimes they'd say something like "ABC News has called this state for Obama. I should say that the BBC has not called this state yet. We repeat, BBC has not called this yet. We will let you know when enough votes are in." Which to me kind of said 'don't go to those dumbass channels, we're not jumping to any conclusions here'.

To be fair, that same game is played amongst the US networks. ABC indeed called first, meanwhile throughout the election season NBC was frequently the one saying, "NBC News has yet to call this race" etc., etc. It's a balance between caution and inevitability. I mean, to play devil's advocate, one could say it is somewhat patronizing to pretend there's a chance California might not end up going Democratic when the early vote count is leaning that way and California has been a reliable Democratic vote for over 15 years.

[ThunderPeel2001]

So they shouldn't have waited at all?

[Chris]

So they shouldn't have waited at all?

Well, the different studios make different judgments about that. Frankly, any rational individual is able to make those election calls considerably earlier than the news outlets themselves are willing to for credibility reasons, which is a strange byproduct of instant global communication--if the viewer receives data at nearly the same rate the news outlet receives it, the "news" becomes almost a formality. In that case, perhaps the role of the news organization in those situations is less to inform and more to definitively confirm. Of course, there is still a premium put on being the first to inform.

So I don't really think there is a simple answer as to which route is correct. Frankly, it's probably for the best that the different outlets have different attitudes. If they didn't, it would either be everyone scrambling to call results first, by increasingly inaccurate metrics, or it would be everyone hanging around in a reporter's game of chicken, trying to accrue as much information as possible without slipping into irrelevancy.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Accuracy beats inaccuracy... FACT!