Tim Blair undone by word-count obsession

Tim Blair’s spooky obsession with counting words on other people’s blogs has now led him into committing a demonstrable falsehood.

Blair says that Tim Dunlop “wrote 1263 words in reply” to an editorial in The Australian.

Dunlop’s post does indeed run to 1,263 words; however, 371 of them are copied’n’pasted from the Oz editorial and other sources. Thus, only 891 words (59%) of the post in question are Dunlop’s own.

You have to ask: What does Blair get out of propagating deliberate falsehoods? And what do his readers get out of the collaborative two-step on his blog?

And what is this nutty obsession of Blair’s with counting words at Dunlop’s site?