Because I’m that sort of person I tend to get my breaking news from Radio 4. I trust it not to be too sensationalist and give me a more rounded view of what’s going on than, say, every other broadcast news outlet out there.
This lunchtime I was pretty sure I heard that Jaguar Land Rover had announced they were closing one of their plants in Birmingham next year. Given the traumatic effect of MG Rover closing in Longbridge and my personal connection of having worked at the Solihull plant for a bit I tweeted the news (because I’m that sort of person) without checking on the web.
I was soon corrected by people who did bother to check. It turns out they’re going to decide which plant to close next year and then actually close it in 2014. So in five years time one of the plants will definitely close. That’s bad news but much less dramatic than suddenly making a few thousand people redundant next summer.
So I just assumed I’d misheard and chalked it down to the ambient nature of radio listening while doing other things. Only when I heard the 2pm news it was the same, implying, if not directly stating, that one of the factories would close next year.
I say implying because it wasn’t so much what they said as what they didn’t say. The headline is that they will decide which factory will close next year. The additional information is that the plant will actually close in 2014 but that wasn’t made clear, so I, in the void of knowledge, assumed the worst.
I guess the lesson is you might be able to believe what you hear but you should always dig deeper and check you’re not inferring before passing it on.
I heard the same Pete. Get irrationally pissed off when the BBC gets it wrong, whereas I’d be much more forgiving of other news providers.
I know it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I do like the concept of “trust and verify”.