[00:01.080]--- lesson 5 The facts
[00:04.960]--- Listen to the tape then answer the question below.
[00:10.520]--- What was the consequence of the editor's insistence on facts and statistics?
[00:18.160]Editors of newspapers and magazines often go to extremes to provide their readers with unimportant facts and statistics.
[00:27.440]Last year a journalist had been instructed by a well-known magazine to write an article on the president's palace in a new African republic.
[00:38.280]When the article arrived, the editor read the first sentence and then refused to publish it.
[00:45.400]The article began: 'Hundreds of steps lead to the high wall which surrounds the president's palace'.
[00:53.480]The editor at once sent the journalist a fax instructing him to find out the exact number of steps and the height of the wall.
[01:03.960]The journalist immediately set out to obtain these important facts,
[01:08.880]but he took a long time to send them. Meanwhile, the editor was getting impatient, for the magazine would soon go to press.
[01:18.360]He sent the journalist two more faxes, but received no reply.
[01:24.120]He sent yet another fax informing the journalist that if he did not reply soon he would be fired.
[01:31.960]When the journalist again failed to reply, the editor reluctantly published the article as it had originally been written.
[01:41.880]A week later, the editor at last received a fax from the journalist.
[01:47.480]Not only had the poor man been arrested, but he had been sent to prison as well.
[01:53.320]However, he had at last been allowed to send a fax in which he informed the editor
[01:59.200]that he had been arrested while counting the 1,084 steps leading to the fifteen-foot wall which surrounded the president's palace.