Internet

Let’s get this straight: it’s no secret the Daily Mail is full of hot air. Even its front page, which is massive, mostly consists of the same, or similar, material repeated two or three times over.

Of course, when I say “material” I speak in the loosest of terms: there’s “femail” celebrity paparazzi dross, usually a story about the evils of the BBC/gays/muslims/Richard Dawkins, peppered with regular pus-rich ejecta from Littlejohn, Hitchens, Moir et al. In fact, I’m pretty certain the only reason anyone does visit the Mail website is to observe the flora and fauna of the comments section.

However, I’m veering off on a tangent here: the stupidity of the Mail‘s hacks/commenters is covered in far more depth (and quality) by Enemies and Speak You’re Branes. Instead, let’s focus on astonishingly lazy journalism.

It seems rather superfluous, as today is no slow news day: the Obamacare reforms have passed in the US, for better or for worse, some former ministers have been filmed displaying outright corruption, Soham murderer Ian Huntley has had a brush with death himself, and Google has stopped censoring its Chinese operation. It is, therefore, a mystery to me as to why the Mail’s front page currently has the news that a woman is pregnant, an idiot nearly won a Darwin Award, and a woman went out of her house whilst wearing some shoes.

Then, however, you run across this:

It seemed like a simple request.

Swansea Council sent an email to its in-house translations service to have a road sign – ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’ – translated into Welsh.

The only problem was that the Welsh translator wasn’t in at the time. An automated email response was sent to council officials who believed it was exactly what they needed.

But in fact it stated: ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.’

Unaware of the real meaning of the message, authorities had it printed on the road sign under the English.

Hmm… haven’t I seen this somewhere before? Oh, yes. Almost one and a half years ago.

There are two possible reasons for this.

1. The Mail‘s journalists were so lazy they didn’t check the source of said story, and therefore failed to see that it was dated some sixteen months ago.
2. The Mail has such contempt for its readers that they believed they could get away with regurgitating this recycled crap to fill up the pages, in the hope no-one would notice that it’s old news.

Given the Mail’s pedigree, I can’t help but wondering if it’s both.