If Nine News Brisbane’s state political editor Tim Arvier is reading this, we hope he’s sitting down.
In fact, he might want to strap himself in as we’ve got a few nice things to say about him and his work, which might come as a big shock seeing we sometimes take the mickey out of him.
This column over time has regretted the shift to the right by various Nine Entertainment Co. media outlets under the chairmanship of Peter Costello. We can confidently claim – and we think there’s plenty of hard evidence to back it up – that the Herald mastheads and the Nine Network newsrooms are now just a little Newcorpse light but getting heavier by the day. Nine’s radio shockjocks haven’t move as much, although to be fair there was fuck-all wriggle room there.
Sadly, we think Nine News in Brisbane is nowhere near as balanced or professional as it should be and it particularly appears hellbent on making sure the state Labor government of Annastacia Palaszczuk gets turfed at the October 2024 poll. Its ongoing portrayal of a state completely at the mercy of youth criminals and a government totally inactive in responding to that state of disaster is relentless. We suspect it ignores crime statistics that put the government in a slightly better light.
It’s led us to run graphics like this one:
The MGH also has had plenty of fun with whoever writes the promos for the 6pm news and the main pointers at the start of the bulletin by Andrew Lofthouse and Melissa Downes. One of the best was when one of these two fine newsreaders began a bulletin with words to the effect: “Queenslanders have reacted angrily to the state government decision…” The Queenslanders who had reacted angrily were Opposition Leader David Crisafulli and Jarrod Bleijie.
Is it any wonder we at the MGH sometimes call Nine News Brisbane’s 6pm bulletin the David Crisafulli Hour.
So do the Nine newsroom’s politics journos pick up on what is expected of them and go hard on Labor? A bit like Newscorpse scribes seem to understand inherently what the Dirty Digger expects of them? No words spoken; no emails sent but instructions nevertheless transmitted and received by some spooky form of mental osmosis, even right across the Pacific Ocean!
If Arvier and his fellow scribes believe they are giving both sides of politics a fair run all the time, then so be it. Maybe they are and we at the MGH are the biased one-eyed ones.
Now, to the bit where Tim might need to strap himself in. We think he’s a solid and dogged reporter in many ways and it is true that he has proactively gotten stuck into the LNP from time to time. Some months back, he caught out Crisafulli for accusing Palaszczuk of doing something he himself was guilty of just months earlier.
Another example is this week’s reports on a new Resolve poll showing further strife for Palaszczuk and her government. Arvier’s report was nicely balanced, and he was the one who made the point that the LNP’s primary vote was less than when they were last turfed out of government. Heck, even Melissa Downes in her lead-in said the LNP still had a mountain to climb to win the next election!
A final feather in Tim’s cap. He has been banging on for some time and some nights now about what he quite reasonably suggested was a cover-up by Palaszczuk and her transport minister over a multi-billion dollar blow out in a train infrastructure build.
We at the MGH readily accept that for a while there we considered Tim’s obsession with this yarn as a sign of that get-Labor bias mentioned earlier.
But Tim has kept at it and both the Premier and that accident-prone minister have now got a real pong about them as they try to convince us that the omission of the new figures after they had been made official for quite some time was a departmental stuff-up and not political trickery.
The Premier’s recent faltering explanation that a date for such a declaration was in the works but had just not reached the date planned for it to be made was cringeworthy. Carry on like that for much longer and we’ll be calling for her head!
Well done, Tim Arvier.
Want to be alerted immediately a new blog hits Australia’s longest running and most offensive satire site? Simply click on the Follow sign or the link below to be emailed new yarns the moment they are uploaded! The very second we go far too far – and trust us we will – you can then quickly unfollow via the three dots!
The Bug Online 