Late this morning I posted a link to what struck me as an interesting story about the fleet of freight ships parked off the coast of southern Malaysia as a result of the global recession.
Freelance journalist Ben Bland saw the link, read the Daily Mail story by Simon Parry and then tore it limb from limb on his blog:
Fearless Parry claims that this fleet of empty ships has "never before" been photographed and that "the world's ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world's economies".
Which would all be great colour were it not for the fact that it's an outrageous exaggeration. Any one of the nearly 40 million passengers who have flown into Singapore's Changi airport in the last year will have been able to spot this "secretive" armada merely by peeking out of the window as they come in to land.
Equally, any one of the thousands of people who walk along the extensive beaches of Singapore's East Coast Park and Sentosa island every day will have been aware of the existence of this "ghost" fleet. As for the ridiculous claim that these ships have "never before" been photographed, in a 15-second search of Google Images, I found pics taken well before this article was published here, here and here.
That's accountability, and all in the space of a few hours.