Mea Culpa: Wildfires spreading and shrinking at the same time

Questions of language and style in The Independent last week, reviewed by John Rentoul

The football field has long been a standard unit of measurement in journalism (Getty)

In an article with a headline that claimed “wildfires engulf Europe”, we managed to minimise the area affected. We said 40,000 hectares was “at least 75 football fields”. This is not untrue in itself, but as Philip Nalpanis pointed out, the grassed area of a UK football pitch is about a hectare (the pitch itself is 0.6 to 0.8 hectares), so it was quite an understatement.

Even if we had got it right, though, the headline was overdoing it – most of Europe was not engulfed by wildfires.

We overdid some of our reporting of the part of Europe that is closer to home as well. Linda Beeley drew my attention to this sentence: “The heatwave caused chaos to transport services as multiple wildfires raged across the country.” There seems to be an unwritten rule of journalism that any disruption to travel must be described as “chaos”, but here we added unnecessary words just to make sure.