Errors & Omissions: Outgunned by a lack of military knowledge

Boats, aircraft and other confusions from this week’s Independent

Guy Keleny
Saturday 25 April 2015 09:17 BST
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Katie Hopkins, the right-wing commentator, has just gained a fresh helping of notoriety by suggesting that the Mediterranean refugee crisis should be sorted out by the use of “gunships”. However, a radio review we published on Thursday said that Hopkins had “suggested setting gunboats on migrants”. It was not the first time those gunships had been turned into gunboats.

Let us be clear about this. A gunboat is, unsurprisingly, a small naval vessel armed with guns for shore bombardment. They were all the rage in the late 19th century, when the reaction of European powers to trouble in faraway places was to “send a gunboat”. A gunship, on the other hand, is, confusingly, an aircraft. It may be either a fixed-wing machine or a helicopter and may be equipped with a variety of weapons, including heavy machine guns, rockets and autocannon, for attacking enemy troops on the ground.

Of course, if you are from some hellish failed state in Africa, trying to make your way to Europe in a leaky and overloaded boat, it makes little difference to you whether Katie Hopkins opens fire on you from a gunboat or a gunship. But newspaper writers still ought to know which they are talking about.

• On Tuesday, we reported on a survey that put figures to the common perception that most professional writers barely scrape a living. The median annual income, apparently, is £10,432. So far so good.

The trouble started with the illustration: a photograph of J K Rowling, which must have been a big help to those many readers who don’t know what J K Rowling looks like. Faced with the dismal task of writing a caption, somebody came up with: “J K Rowling earns around $14m a year, thanks to the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise. But not all writers are so fortunate.”

Really? I thought they were.

• Yesterday we published a review of the new film The Falling, a drama set in a girls’ school in 1969: “The teachers and parents still seem stuck in a pinched, conservative Britain that makes no allowances to changing times. The mums wear aprons, have their hair in beehives and watch Robin Day on news programmes on their little black-and-white TV.”

That makes it sound as if people didn’t want colour TV. They did, of course – and regular colour broadcasting had started on BBC Two in 1967.

• “Russia is sending more troops to its border with Ukraine, where it has built up its largest force since October last year, US officials said yesterday,” said a news story on Thursday. Why October last year? What happened then?

In any case, such relative figures tell you nothing about the actual size of the force. It could be that the Russians had two tanks on the border last October, but three now. All such a figure does is give you the impression of a growing menace. Why do these “US officials” want you to have that impression?

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