Thomas Hardy VC indeed!

[chickenfeet]

coughingbear drew attention to this article in the Grauniad which manages to claim that Captain Thomas Hardy won the Victoria Cross at Trafalgar. I'm curious and mean so I did some digging and found this surprisingly similar story in the Sydney Morning Herald which looks very much like the Guardian story with the crucial difference that it refers to "a medal" not a VC, won by Hardy at Trafalgar. So, it looks like The Guardian has plagiarised a story from the SMH without attribution and then in trying to gussy it up a bit has committed a howler. Truly with the ghosts of Scott and Cardus I cry "O tempora, O mores" and this in the week of the Old Trafford test.

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

You're invoking Cardus against gussying up?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I may be wrong but his style was distinctive enough to suggest that at least he wrote his own copy

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Oh, certainly, but he also made some of it up. Comparing his original reports with his autobiography, I was disappointed to find the "every so-and-so year" story wasn't nearly as funny in the original.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Besides it's not the "gussying up" per se I object to it's the plagiarism and the inanity.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

You could take it up with Ian Mayes, the readers' editor, at reader@guardian.co.uk if it bothers you that much - at least he could put in a correction if the other medal wasn't a VC. It's possible both papers were drawing on a press release or agency report, and if not it's always been a journalist's duty to trawl the rival papers and find out what he/she has missed.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

if the other medal wasn't a VC.

If???

They'll be writing about the AK47 that was used to shoot Harold at Hastings next.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

You could take it up with Ian Mayes, the readers' editor,

I know of at least two people who have and I imagine a howler like that will actually have attracted rather a lot. However, nothing in the "Corrections and Clarifications" and the original article is uncorrected on the web site.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I've a vague notion there's a policy not to correct originals because it gives a false impression of what was originally published, and to add corrections at the end instead, though I may be misremembering that. Re corrections, it depends on how many they're getting - I think a lot more now than when they first started the system, because the first couple of times I wrote in some years ago I got chatty replies, and now just auto-acknowledgments, which suggests they're snowed under. A few of mine go in, most don't.

[coughingbear]

It appears that it's been silently corrected - it now says:

'The selling price breaks an A$595,000 record set in 2005 for a specially minted gold medal won by Captain Thomas Hardy during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.'

But it was acknowledged in the Corrections column, so possibly I can pride myself on having an effect.

A footnote

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

The corrections column in Saturday's Times (which runs weekly instead of daily, and adopts an irritatingly arch tone) admits that they made the same error in an article on Tuesday, but the night editor spotted it in time to correct the final edition. My first thought was that this indicated the original blunder was in a press release used by both papers, but since the Times ran the story a day later it's equally possible that they just picked it up from the Guardian.

Re: A footnote - PS

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

They said they had fifty complaints re the earlier editions.

Re: A footnote

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

And, as I pointed out, an even earlier article in the SMH did not contain the error.

Re: A footnote

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I know, which indicates that it wasn't part of the Times foodchain.