The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.
Never before has an entire Mediocre Bytes column been devoted to just one television news service.
But before we take the mickey out of last night’s (Saturday’s) 6pm Nine Network news bulletin out of Brisbane, can we just say this? For almost a decade, The Bug‘s main evening news service watched was Peter Overton’s Sydney bulletin. The laughable mistakes were often and varied.
In the past year, Channel 9’s Brisbane news has been our focus. We haven’t the skill, time or the money to see them all. We’re assured, though, that the other three Brisbane nightly news services are often as bad … or worse.
Okay, explanation over. Let’s roll the tape!
It’s 6.09pm into last night’s Nine service and we have this!
It’s a doozey, isn’t it? to be fair, Pakistan and Palestine both start with a P.
Let’s move on to the station’s bizarre show of stubborness in refusing to ditch a laughable design feature it began about a month ago and should have lasted a night. It’s the one where the entire screen shows a map of where the next story is coming from, then repeated in the corner as the reporter tells their tale.
Here’s Lily Greer’s story last night on the Queensland Parliament Speaker taking a spell to spend more time with his problems.
Yeah, we know. It’s fucking stupid, right? But it’s almost got to the stage now that it gives us so many laughs during Nine’s 60-minute bulletins that it would almost be a pity to see it axed.
Next up is a story the bulletin ran the night before: a Mount Tamborine garage giving away $100 worth of petrol to the first 200 customers who can show they are exploring the scenic rim by having their car chockablock with camping gear.
Yeah, we know! A story maybe worth one mention? But two? But the thing that drew our attention to last night’s follow-up story was the bulletin’s decision to say the promotion was sponsored by “a beer company” and “an outdoor equipment company”. Bloody hell! What does Nine News think it is? The AB Bloody C?
The grim reality is most likely the fact that both the beer company and the outdoorsy stuff retailer should advertise more with Nine – or start advertising – and they might have been given a plug! Whoever they are, they need to learn from the likes of Costco and Aldi and their shameless creampuff plugs of recent times!
We might also add that the real story last night might have been how many of those drivers spent good money hiring outdoorsy stuff just for the day to grab that hundred bucks worth of fuel? Now that might really have been a good yarn showing just how tough times are for people at the moment.
And to finish off, how about this effort?
The bulletin’s captions people weren’t having the best of nights, were they? How many kings can you see there, BUGgers? That’s right. One!
And seeing Chucky is likely to be on the throne for three more decades (hint: is your shit taken away each day and forensically examined by top royal doctors?), so it’s a pretty bizarre assumption on the part of Nine News that William and George will get to be king before what used to be Great Britain turns into a third-world, poverty-stricken, Much Littler Britain and becomes a republic.
And even if George does become king of What’s Left of Britain in about sixty years time, the very thought that he might also still be King of Australia gives our Mediocre Bytes compilers heart palpitations and uncontrollable squirts, not necessarily in that order.
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