Sunday, September 30, 2007

More Ignorance from the MSM!

This time in the Mail on Sunday.

In an article about Gordon Ramsey's restaurant in New York, largely complaining of the smell is this priceless piece of sheer utter incompetent ignorance that litters the mass media:

The racket it makes has been measured at 57 decibels, they say - above the limit for local events such as rock concerts.


To give you an idea 60 decibels is what you get from you average TV, if you are 1M from it, wheres living 10M from a major road gives you 80-90.

A rock concert is some 110-120 decibels. Please note that decibels are logarithmic so 20 decibels is twice as loud as 10, 30 is twice as load as 20, not that you could hear either.

If my neighbors were as loud as that I would be happy. Clearly there is some big error in checking the story. Either the people complaining are making a fuss about nothing or the noise levels are incorrect or incomplete.

3 comments:

Colin Campbell said...

Correcting this kind of stuff should be the job of the paper not amateur blog writers. I set the bar low with papers like those. I remember the Editor of Weekly World News, who said that at least something about every story was true. I think that the MSM is closer to this than we know.

Benedict White said...

Colin, shocking just how bad they are isn't it?

Why can't they just check what counts as load on the db scale?

Anonymous said...

Or it's a typo? Sure it should be checked, but even then things will sneak through - you even find such mistakes in science textbooks.

Given that they have a deadline by which they have to publish, and that once they have done so it's too late to correct (unlike a blog), it's not surprising that there would be typos.

Even if they should be corrected by the sub-editors.