Wow, Tom Cruise flew himself to the Top Gun premiere in a helicopter!
Oh no he didn’t!
Oh yes he did!
In fact, it says here he “slowly descended it”:
The trouble with reading an article when the Mail Online repair crew is halfway through fixing it is that it can be difficult to work out what’s going on. Pieces get rushed up, problems get spotted, angles get tweaked, but it doesn’t all happen at once, and some things don’t get put right for hours, or at all.
This article, on the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in San Diego, went live at one in the morning in the UK
– or 5pm on the day of the event Pacific time, so very promptly indeed, and one or two spur-of-the-moment misunderstandings are to be expected. Obviously someone has been back in to the body text to remove the claims about Cruise doing his own piloting, and toned down the article headline
but, as of 9:28 the same morning, the video caption, picture caption and homepage headline remain uncorrected.
One or two other things don’t seem to be quite right either. Top Gun came out in 1986, so this is all happening 36 years later, not 34 years later as the headline claims. Also, at one point it says of Cruise’s co-star Jennifer Connelly:
But Connelly wasn’t in the original Top Gun. The character she is now playing, Penny Benjamin, was mentioned in the first film but never shown – she is the unseen admiral’s daughter in the line “You lost your qualifications as section leader three times … with a history of high speed passes over five air control towers and one admiral’s daughter!”
However, a further four hours later, someone on the Mail has made another flyby
– it’s not clear why it took that long to get round to it, but perhaps the pattern was full – and things have improved considerably. The adding-up in the headline is fixed:
all traces of misinformation about Cruise flying himself in have been expunged:
and significant additions to the text now help you understand who many of the people in the 96 (96!) photographs embedded in the piece actually are.
Still and all, this has taken 14 hours of on-off editing, in public, to get right. I understand the urge to rush something up and be first with the news – you don’t want to hold on so tight that you lose the edge – but would 40 minutes of extra editing time really have been a disaster when your unique saturation coverage is bound to draw a big audience anyway?
And, as we have seen before, some of the more-haste-less-speed inaccuracies have survived even this rewrite; Connelly is still, in this version, “reprising” a role she has never previously played. Also, as part of the improvements to the piece, there is now a fact box about the helicopter itself – only it’s in such a raw state that it seems to have been downloaded straight from the Notes app on someone’s phone.
And so the cycle of improvement can begin anew – or it could if the repair crew, going Mach 2 with their hair on fire, hadn’t long since been forced to move on to other things.
Ten minutes past deadline 