Plunges

One has become accustomed to some newspapers publishing lurid headlines.  The Sun (a British newspaper) has had a long history of ‘interesting’ headlines with, perhaps, one of the all-time favourites being this:

13th March 1986

Those from other countries may wonder just who Freddie Starr is. (Those of us from England frequently wonder just who he is!!)

Anyway, this habit of using extreme language seems far too common in all forms of media and the dear old BBC presented a wonderful example of this.

A news item was headlined (29th July),

Oil price plunges as stocks grow

Plunges indeed!  Well that’s great news as a huge reduction in gas/petrol prices would be great news for millions of hard-pressed motorists.  But, wait, the reduction in price was just $3.88 a barrel.  Hardly warrants a “steep and rapid fall” as the word plunge may be defined.

And for the record, here is the price of US Light Crude over the last 6 weeks:

24th July    $62.44

17th July    $58.06

10th July    $60.87

3rd July      $66.87

26th June   $65.92

19th June   $67.56

This type of exaggeration is very tiresome, don’t you think?

So congratulations to Reuters who presented the news item, thus:

Oil posts biggest loss since April as supplies jump

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil dropped nearly 6 percent on Wednesday to near $63 a barrel in the biggest one-day slide since April after data showed a surge in U.S. crude inventories on higher imports and lower refinery activity.

By Paul Handover