Right — how many mistakes can you find in this paragraph from the Times?
Parishes throughout the country use Visual Liturgy, a Church of England website1 containing information on hymns, prayers and forms of service, as a useful tool for preparing worship. Recently the site2 warned users that a virus had entered the system and that they should delete it at once.
Unfortunately what they were told to delete was not a virus at all. The supposedly guilty file was an essential element of the site3 that made the whole system4 work.
Oh well, it makes a change from getting the theological details wrong. But, please not, the whole story had been correctly reported on the BBC the day before.
1 No, a program, distributed on CDs
2 No, Norton Anti-virus
3 No, of the Visual Liturgy program. There is no web site involved
4 No, the program. There is no web site involved.
To give credit where credit is due, the story was FIRST reported by “ZDnet”:http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39280391,00.htm.
Twentyfour hours later (more or less) the problem was sorted, and “this came forth from the ZDnet editorial pen”:http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39280433,00.htm.
But what the Times reporter missed was that Symantec had lied. They claimed they had fixed it on 11 July and had sent an email to report this event, but that email can be read “here”:http://vislit.com/articles/060804norton_email.html.
While it was nice to be quoted by The Times (a first for me), it was a shame they got so much wrong.
It’s one thing to rip off our quotes, but couldn’t they have been bothered to take the facts as well?
I’ve had that before, when trying to help out journos on the nationals (and the BBC, to a lesser extent) – they seem to assume that anything remotely technical I might have to tell them is ipso facto incomprehensible and therefore unimportant, so they don’t bother listening. It’s that enthusiasts with typewriters schtick.
R