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.
Who needs a court system to process crooks – sorry, alleged crooks – when the media often make up the minds of their readers and viewers for them.
InQueensland on Thursday made it fairly clear there would be no need for a messy and expensive commital hearing and then trial to determine the guilt or otherwise of the truckdriver charged over an alleged ramming on the Darling Downs the day before.
Mediocre Bytes has often had fun with breathless tyro TV reporters banging on about how some teenagers who robbed a convenience store were caught by police in a nearby suburb and had been charged. Oh, dear! No doubt about guilt then!
InQueensland‘s contribution above is a variation of that theme and we thank the online news site for its fine effort. Would be cop killer! That noise you just heard would have been old subs spinning in their graves.
Still, it’s good to see InQueensland continuing a proud tradition of using really clumsy words that ignore that silly old notion of “innocent until proven guilty” that used to form the basis of common law in Queensland and elsewhere.
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A similar theme to the story above is the way a lot of media never quite get right the times to use “alleged” and “allegedly”. Sometimes it’s horrendously overused; there are times when it really should be used but inexplicably goes missing.
Sometimes, media needs to accept that all sides involved in a news story agree on what happened. For that reason, we saw no reason at all for the number of outlets who talked about the old lady “allegedly” being tasered in that Cooma aged care home.
That she was tasered was never, ever in doubt. Come to think of it, neither was the identity of the senior constable who did the tasering. “Alleged” and “allegedly” were not necessary regardless of how the incident was reported.
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We’ve banged on before about the exceptionally wide misreporting of an inner Brisbane suburb that goes by the name Grange. It has never, ever, been The Grange, although that was the name of an historic homestead in the suburb.
Yet over recent days both local Brisbane media (inexcusable) and southern media (get it right from now on!) have talked about something newsy that happened in The Grange.
They may as well be reporting on a home invasion in The Chermside, a house fire in The Highgate Hill or a bad car crash in The Tempe.
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