Dave’s Rants

During the week I wrote about the excellent fact checking Sarah Carey did illustrating that Eddie Hobbs is capable of making assertions that may be lies. Now it’s the turn of the journalists reporting on Eddie to be shown up.

Every Sunday I get up early to read the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Times, the Independent are the target of my post today. It’s not that they’ve been wrong on something massive it’s the fact that they’re wrong on something easily verifiable which of course makes you worry about how correct they are on the more important stuff.

Lara Bradley wrote an article on Eddie ‘the people’s hero’ which goes as far as to say that Eddie will decided the make-up of the next Government. Well ignoring the penchant of hyperbole displayed I read on and came to this paragraph.

And that great barometer of public opinion, the internet, is alight with chatter about Mr Hobbs. It seems his praises cannot be sung too loudly amongst those who enjoy the anonymous forum of the chat-room. A Google search for “Eddie Hobbs and Rip-Off Republic” throws up an impressive 6,340 hits. His “hobbit-like” looks are discussed at length and some sites have identified him as a gay icon. But, mostly, people are just relieved that finally someone is taking on the rip-off culture.

Now I happened to just do that search - “Eddie Hobbs and Rip-Off Republic“ - and as you can see below I didn’t get anything like an impressive 6,340 hits.

Now it’s not that it’s a big deal but you really do end up wondering about all the other ‘facts’ in the paper if simply verifiable ones like that are wrong. Of course that’s without going into the fact that she ignores the fact that there is a serious debate on the validity of Eddie’s claims going on and simply breaks it down to the numerous items of ‘His “hobbit-like” looks’ etc.

Update 28th August 2005 15:27 BST: John in the comments has a possible answer to why the report is so far off.