Errors & Omissions: Reporters should know if they’re covering a true first

Don’t be vague: check it or drop it. A review of this week’s Independent

On Thursday we carried a story about a London pub (above) that a development company demolished without planning permission. Westminster council has ordered the company to rebuild it just as it was. The report revealed: “It is one of the first times a council has insisted that a building be rebuilt.”

A strict logician would no doubt place an absolute interdict on “one of the first”. There can be only one first: you can’t have a group of “the first”. However, few would quarrel with a sentence such as “Jan van Eyck was one of the first artists to employ the new technique of oil painting” – though our strict logician might insist on “one of the earliest”. But in a news story, “one of the first” invites ridicule.

“Come on,” sneers the unkind reader, “is it the first or not? You don’t know, do you? Make a few phone calls and find out. Call yourself a reporter?” All most unpleasant, and best avoided.

• Another trick to avoid being specific surfaced in our election coverage on the same day: “European Union plans to tackle the African migrant emergency are a ‘direct threat to our civilisation’, Nigel Farage has claimed.” Come on – what do you mean? “Tackling” the African migrant emergency might mean anything from setting up reception centres in Sicily to invading Libya.

• Further vagueness from the opening of a news story last Saturday: “A new campaign has been launched to scrap the planned renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system in the hope of forcing a Labour-led government to drop its support for the move.” We have already been told what “the move” is. What a limp end to the sentence.

• An opinion piece last Saturday had a mangled prescription for the ills of the NHS: “Middle management needs to be culled, and a training programme for nurses and doctors. And charges should be imposed for non-life-threatening procedures. Tesco and the NHS are in the last-chance saloon – to survive, both need radical surgery.”

So, are we to think that a training programme needs to be culled (we are not told what else is to happen to it), life-threatening procedures (leeches?) are to come free, and finally, a life-saving operation needs to be carried out in a saloon?

• A picture caption published last Saturday referred to an exhibition of sculpture “in Florence, Italy”. Some cities are world cities; you don’t have to say which country they are in. Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, is surely one of them. Nobody would assume that you meant Florence, South Carolina – nobody, that is, outside South Carolina.

• “Vicars are employed by God not the Church, says court,” said the headline on a news story yesterday. So, the ruling doesn’t cover rectors, archdeacons and the rest? It is true that the cleric in this case was a vicar, but the headline needed to say “clergy”.