The Associated Press wire copy running on ABC News says of Typhoon Dolphin: "Before the typhoon hit, more than 300,000 people were preemptively relocated" [1]. The Washington Times carries the same wire under its own headline: "Typhoon Dolphin hit China's eastern coast Sunday evening after forcing over 300,000 people to preemptively relocate" [2]. Both versions were live and uncorrected when we archived the ABC News copy today.
Same-day official figures, reported with jurisdiction-level attribution by Al Jazeera, describe a relocation effort of a different order [3]. Wenzhou relocated more than 900,000 people. Taizhou relocated about 390,000. Shanghai relocated at least 30,300. Fujian province relocated about 98,900. Euronews, reporting the same storm the same day, corroborates the scale: over 1 million people evacuated as Dolphin came ashore [4].
The arithmetic is not close. 900,000 plus 390,000 plus 30,300 plus 98,900 is 1,419,200. The wire figure of 300,000 understates the officially reported relocation effort by 1,119,200 people, a factor of roughly four and a half. Two of the four inputs are floors or approximations, the "more than" in Wenzhou's count and the "about" in Fujian's, so 1,419,200 is itself a conservative reading of the official record.
The wire deserves its due before the correction. A figure of 300,000-plus was almost certainly accurate when it was first filed. Evacuation tallies ahead of a landfalling typhoon start small and grow by the hour, and an early snapshot of an operation that eventually moved 1.4 million people would have passed through 300,000 on the way up. The sentence is also, on its own terms, still true: 1,419,200 is more than 300,000. Nobody wrote a false number.
That is why our verdict is MISLEADING rather than false. The failure is not the figure; it is the freshness. The official jurisdiction-level counts were published and attributed by other international outlets on the day of landfall, which means the corrected number was available to any desk that went looking. The wire copy kept running with a tally roughly one fifth of the documented scale, and a day later it still does.
Scale is the story in a mass evacuation. Moving 300,000 people ahead of a storm is a serious logistical effort; moving 1.4 million is one of the larger peacetime relocations a government can execute, and it is the kind of fact readers use to judge both the storm's severity and the response's competence. Readers of two national outlets currently hold the smaller picture. The record, printed the same day by Al Jazeera and corroborated by Euronews, is about 4.7 times larger [3][4].
