ST's Typos Get Grander

I just came back after a week in Phuket to an interesting email from a buddy showing an abysmal error right in the top-middle of Saturday's front page. Unlike previous errors which occurred primarily within the article text, this was in a prominent highlight strip referring to an article inside the paper for that day.

spotted by Mr Lim Wei Teck

Where other mistakes seem to have been a result of logical oversight, this appears to be due to blatant laziness (of writer, editor, intern and even the printing staff) in checking the material.

Perhaps this is the reason (i.e. allowing gross mistakes to run in the paper) why the ST was ranked higher this year (133 from 144 last year) in the Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders?

Well, in any case this speculation is more plausible than Zaqy Mohamad's suggestion that it is "because of the media diversity here, with mainstream media going online (that) creates pressure for media agencies to provide better-quality work." By the way, the index measures the level of press freedom only and not the actual quality of press.

ST's Word of the Day: Refridgerators

I chanced upon a good article entitled Wacky ideas to go green penned by Ms Ho Ai Li, the Taiwan Correspondent to the Straits Times, that discussed the environmental sensitivity of the Taiwanese as compared to Singaporeans. What caught my eye though was the overly-juvenile oversight of spelling 'refrigerators' as 'refridgerators' (see below).

Of course it's obvious that the word 'fridge' interfered with the longer word 'refrigerator' here but still, this is something I would hardly expect from our self-proclaimed 'best-of-the best' ST journalists. In fact, it's rather incredulous how both the writer and editor missed a mistake which we would chide our secondary school students for.

Straits Times and its Stupid Polls

As usual, another pointless straw poll was conducted and reported in the Straits Times today entitled 'Foreigners welcome, say teens' which comprised asking 100 random (one hopes) youngsters a few questions on their perception of foreigners in Singapore. Then, as if the extremely small number of 100 wasn't already silly enough, this group was inextricably further divided into 2 age groups (13-18 vs 19-24) to arrive at (one can only assume) a positive angle for the story.

Of the innumerable problems with the interpretation of the 'findings', the one that calls for a big fat "what the..." is clearly the age groups selected as categories. The definition of teen (i.e. teenager) is a person in their teens (meaning 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 AND 19, inclusive), so there is no logical reason to separate 19 from the group classified by ST as 'teens'.

original source: Straits Times

Perhaps it is because without this senseless separation of the sample size, the headline would read 'Foreigners NOT welcome, say young Singaporeans'? If we look at the portion circled in red above, not having these silly categories (i.e. 13-18 vs 19-24), causes the findings to show that a clear 38% of respondents felt that immigration rules should be tighter and only 25% wanted to keep them as they are with another 25% wanting them to be relaxed.

Well, going by the way ST's been throwing out these ridiculous polls, I guess it would be alright then to quote TOC's polls which regularly receive 200+ votes each. So, for example, we could say 93% of the blogosphere was not quite impressed with the PAP's National Day Message or 83% of the blogosphere rated MOM's performance as 'poor' or 'bad' (see poll results below).

source: TOC

source: TOC