Not long after full-time, when Jamie Vardy had come off the bench for England, to score their equaliser against Wales, reports started appearing that the BBC had made a bit of a whoospie.
People wasted no time in sending a screenshot of the apparent BBC report to us:
First we had this:
@DailyCannon BBC’s minute by minute coverage bizarrely named JAMIE VARDY as an ARSENAL PLAYER!! #ENGWAL pic.twitter.com/XOKpBLJhFh
— Kenny Gooner (@DNA_rsenal) June 16, 2016
Then we had this (seems the original tweet was deleted):
we see after the Euros. pic.twitter.com/t5KKWptEs6
— Kenny Gooner (@DNA_rsenal) June 16, 2016
Of course, they are both fake, as Twitter also told us (and showed us):
here u go pic.twitter.com/Q1H2vd8QMO
— Ali (@Ozilaccuracy) June 16, 2016
The in-game one has a URL of ‘bbc.com’. If you go to BBC.com, it redirects to bbc.co.uk and when you check out the live text, it says:
So imagine our surprise to see the Daily Star running an article with the headline:
Arsenal News: BBC make Vardy gaffe, Arteta off to Man City
This is the headline that’s in their feed. When you go to the article, you are greeted with a headline that does not mention the BBC, the article most certainly does:
And it wasn’t just the Daily Star, it was the Sun too who kindly circle the mistake in case you’re too stupid to see it yourself:
Right now you might be thinking that, perhaps, whoever was doing the live text simply made a mistake and then corrected it. That would make sense and it’s certainly a possibility.
It becomes less likely, however, when you realise that NO player is mentioned with a club, just a country. See for yourself. That’s clearly a direction to whomever is running the live updates.
Here at Cannon Towers, we often get things wrong, me probably more than everyone else. But we do the best we can, with the resources we have, to verify information before we run a story on it.
These are national newspapers.
If we don’t know, we just say we don’t know, and if we (I) get something wrong, I will happily admit my mistake and hope to learn from it. I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again, but I can guarantee that I’ll try to ensure it doesn’t.
On Twitter, I’ve been complaining a lot about the standards of ‘journalism’ these days, with reporters who would rather ask Joachim Low why he sniffed his fingers after he picked his ass, than find an actual story to write about which might enhance the setting of the game we love so much.
In this case, we’d have settled for a simple search on Twitter to get to the bottom of this. One person often misses things, but the hive-mind of Twitter rarely does.
Used well, it can be the gateway to the truth. Used like this? Well, all we get are more lies.
I know which I’d prefer.
(It’s worth noting that the Daily Star or Sun weren’t the only ones to run this story, but they are, at the time of writing, the biggest)