Dumb Yankees
Don’t get to excited by the subject line, Southerners, ‘cuz I mean it in the international sense of the world, which doesn’t care which side of the Mason-Dixon line you hail from. I refer to this dumbed-down version of a Times of London article about a man who died when some rescue workers decided he wasn’t worth saving. The story itself is obscene enough, and probably warrants a blog entry of its own, if only to show that 911 horror stories are not limited to the United States, though in this case it wasn’t the operator who screwed things up, but the “help” that wasn’t. But that’s another matter. My concern with this post was FoxNews’s editorial decision to falsely state that a British man had dialed 911 in an emergency, when of course he had actually dialed 999. A bit pedantic on my part? Maybe, but then again, some of us ‘Mercuns might actually like to travel to Britain someday, and if we do, it would be good for all of us to know what number to dial in the event of an emergency. And what better way to help educate us on this matter, than to report what actually happened rather than what would have happened if the same event had occurred here?
Coming next: FoxNews inverting all photos that show cars on streets, so it will look as though the Brits drive on the right rather than the left. And maybe a few superimposed guns here and there, just so we gun-loving Yanks can relate.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Shoot, I thought you were going to finally use it in the Texan sense of the word, as in “not a Texan.”
Phelps´s last blog post..Impressive
January 10th, 2009 at 9:30 am
And I thought it was going to be a pro-BoSox post…
January 11th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I can _see_ the thought process that leads some editor to think it’s better to type “he dialed 911″ than “he dialed Britain’s emergency number, 999,” but it’s hard to fathom how, having thought it, he/she could think it’s _better._ They claim to want to “educate” us. What could be more educational in this case than telling us what they dial in Britain? But no, it’s use cutesy editing to keep us in our derided ignorance.
Anwyn´s last blog post..“Telling One’s Dreams Is the Last Word in Egotism”
January 20th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Fox is not supposed to rewrite the news so as to accomodate our tiny American brains. They’re supposed to tell us what happened. We can handle it. We can figure out that “999″ is their “911″.
Then maybe it was the Fox spelling checker that automatically corrects “9″ numbers into “911″.
Another point: the two bozos were arrested, so this isn’t British policy.