Water Ink

Yes it is cold out there. It hasn’t been so cold for so long for many years in the UK. Minus 20C is cold. But why the British media insist that here is “almost as cold as the South Pole”? Times put it in the headline, Guardian and Telegraph (“only 2C warmer than the South Pole”) said so. The comparison is too good to miss for Channel 4 News and BBC News as well.

The temperature at the South Pole is about -22C to -25C at the moment. It is technically true that the coldest place in the UK is only a couple of degrees warmer than the South Pole. But I’m wondering whether the journalists realised, or chose to ignore the fact that it is summer now at Antarctica?

A Chinese blogger accused CCTV (China Central Television) News Channel’s recently unveiled countdown sequence plagirised BBC News’s countdown. I think what he’s talking about is the music. He’s obviously an admirer of the BBC sequence, displaying almost second-by-second stills from it. I’m not a music expert. To my untrained ears, they do sound a bit similar.