…with embarrassment?
Channel Nine’s 6pm news out of Brisbane continues to provide The Bug‘s Media Glass House with shameless, largely unnewsworthy, plugs for advertisers’ products.
Last Sunday night was no exception with a creampuff piece on the obscene amounts of money being spent by the distributors of the Barbie move that opens today.
We almost felt sorry for newsreader Mia Glover who had to come up with this shite: “Painting the city pink. Barbie fever is sweeping the nation and Brisbane is certainly not immune. Even bus stops in the city are embracing Barbie ahead of the film’s release later this week.
“This one decorated in hot pink and shinning glitter… fans can now wait for the bus in style and comfort on Barbie’s dream couch”.
What the MGH really liked was how the word “promotion” or words “the film’s distributors” never escaped Ms Glover’s lovely lips. It’s almost as if, maybe, the bulletin wanted viewers to believe some Barbie fan had gone to all this trouble for the iconic doll they clearly much loved in their childhood.
Or better still! Maybe the Brisbane City Council stumped up for this mighty expense. Perhaps Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner had dozens of Barbie dolls as a child? Now that would be news!
Ms Glover did use the plural “bus stops” so maybe the real story might have been this: Is this film promotion the most expensive the city has ever seen? How many inner-city bus stops have been decked out and what did it cost, what with all those dream couches included? Surely not just the one for a TV news spot?
Another possible question could have been: “How big a turkey could this flick possibly be if the people behind Barbie are going to such expensive lengths to flog it before its release.”
Okay, cheap shot! With the amount of advertising we assume the Barbie people are spending on the Nine and other networks, we’d probably be giving them shameless free plugs like this as well.
What are glass houses made of again? And what’s that thing about throwing stones? Still, we’d like to think we’d be just a little bit less brownnosey about it.
And, besides, we do appreciate how hard it is to fill a 60-minute Sunday night news bulletin if not enough amateur footage of relatively minor traffic bingles is available.
***
Our sister media monitor, Mediocre Bytes, had some fun recently with the frequent wrong use of “alleged and allegedly” by our mainstream mediocre.
And for that reason, we were a tad disappointed to read the pointer (below) in the online version of the national broadshit The Australian for a court story on the ongoing sexual assault trial of US actor Kevin Spacey.
UK pop star Elton John and his husband David Furnish gave evidence about the date of a visit Spacey made to their house to attend a party and said the American star had spent the night there after the event.
The evidence was important because the date of the party as provided by the pair differed from the date given by one of Spacey’s alleged victims who claimed to have been assaulted while driving the US star to the Rocket Man’s residence.
Our MGH researchers note that the full story in The Oz contained no direct quote from Elton John to the court anywhere near similar to the one used in the pointer.
But we do wonder what sort of friend Elton John really is if he forgot to throw the word “alleged” before “assault” in his oral testimony.
And if he did say alleged assault, that’s shitpoor journalism by David Woods or the tech nerd who created the online pointer.
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