While The Bug‘s Media Glass House tends to concentrate on the big issues – for example, why aren’t mastheads such as The Courier-Mail, The Age, the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph newspapers any more – Mediocre Bytes honours the little fishy things that by themselves might not stink up a journo’s sugar bag down on a jetty but collectively point to a real pong that sadly shows the decline of journalism standards in Oz.

The entries in this column vie for The Bug’s uncoveted Terry Lewis annual award, named after the corrupt Queensland police commissioner who always thought the little fishes – the brown paper bags containing the smaller cash bribes – tasted the sweetest. Maybe he got a thrill out of knowing that the illegal gambling den and brothel owners forking out the small-fish payments could least afford them and that got him excited?

At top is one our eage-eyed judges spied yesterday: this Twitter posting by The Age in Melbourne, very reluctantly reporting that the Andrews Labor government had won 56 seats at the recent state election, surpassing their 2018 Danslide.

We appreciate The Age gave it their all to get rid of the Labor government – in some ways gave the Herald Sun a run for its money, which is saying something! – and it must really grate to have to admit defeat but really! On course to win 56 seats?

On course? On track? Poor dear old Age. Labor had passed the winning post, saluted the judges and were being rubbed down and the poor buggers at The Age still had them on the home straight, praying for a late stumble that woulld somehow make this disastrous poll outcome a little less stomach churning for Peter Costello et al.

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A quality compact? Sure!

Our Mediocre Bytes compilers caught sight of this little gem just this morning, on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald – the paper that’s getting very close to being added to the list in our intro.

Why did we like this one so much? Normally we wouldn’t bother but this heading is not in some trashy tabloid; it’s in a supposedly quality compact. (insert prolonged and loud canned laughter here).

We’d like to think that even a sub-editor on a trashy tabloid would have thought twice before using “sleigh” the way they have. It’s not clever. It’s not smart. It’s bloody woeful.

Plays on words are fine, provided they make a modicum of sense and show some creativity.

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Ah, you’ve got to admire truth in advertising. Eagle-eyed Tweeterer AusPolCommenter shared this one!

Looks like The Age has the work cut out for it it finding the right person to helm the masthead moving forward, as Julia Gillard was wont to say.

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Probably one of the first things that the good folk here at The Bug had drummed into them as young cadets way back in the last millennium was that a collision was between two moving objects.

Channel 9’s 6pm Brisbane news the other night forgot that golden rule, reporting that a car had collided with something rather stationary. Sorry, but we were shaking our heads too much to write down exactly what this car had “collided with”.

In their day – and we mean our washed-up, bitter old hacks’ day they now barely remember – a car simply hit a tree or a lamp post or a fence. HIT A. End of story.

Tyros in the craft should try it once or twice. Trust us; it will make you feel good. Well, it will if you have any desire whatsoever to be good journalists.