Kudos to the alert New York Times editor who improved a dispatch from London.
My print edition of the paper had a sentence saying, "Mr. Osborne sought on Wednesday to reassure voters about policy areas in which the Conservatives score lower, like the defense of Britain's free education and health care."
I was all ready to write a Smartertimes post pointing out that this education and health care is not "free," as the Times news article imagined it, but is rather delivered at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (or pounds).
But when I went on to the Times Web site, the language had been fixed so that it now reads:
On Wednesday, Mr. Osborne sought to reassure voters over policy areas in which the Conservatives score lower, for example by adhering to the government's policy of largely protecting spending on schools and the health service. In Britain, voters tend to trust the Conservatives less than Labour to defend education and health care, which is free at the point of delivery. [Emphasis added by Smartertimes].
It may seem like a minor change, and the Times probably won't run a printed correction on the point, but in a subtle way the new phrasing on the Web is better than the phrasing in the print edition, which promotes the illusion that these services are "free" even though they cost lots of money, it is just paid in taxes rather than in fees.