Promos for Nine News Brisbane’s 4pm and 6pm bulletins yesterday banged on relentlessly about how the Queensland government had lied to victims of youth crime.
The heading above is exactly how those promos began. First-person stuff that clearly had originated from the Victims of Crime community group that, the promos made clear, was in revolt over a government that was “failing to deliver”.
We suspect you BUGgers out there know where this is heading. The MGH has repeatedly raised examples of promos for Nine News Brisbane bulletins that are fiercely anti-Labor in tone and intent but which never reflect what follows. We’ve often commented that whoever writes these spiels that poor dear Andrew Lofthouse and Melissa Downes are forced to read out must surely be a card-carrying member of the LNP. Considering recent examples, let’s forget the “surely”; makes us sound wishy-washy.
Indeed, one of our bitter-washed up old hacks who compile this column turned to his missus late yesterday afternoon and bet his dried-up balls that “the government lied to us” would not get a mention come 6pm. He still has his dried-up and useless old balls.
Lofthouse began the segment by saying that youth crime victims “are still not being heard”. An interesting observation seeing those crime victims “had piled into State parliament” to recount their frightening experiences. Maybe reporter Peter Fegan meant outside Parliament House.
Fegan was then not long into his report before he felt it necessary to add once more that Capalaba MP Don Brown had claimed youth crime was a beatup. This is a monstrous beatup by Fegan himself. Brown recently got stuck into Nine News, claiming one report on one night was a beatup. He wasn’t half wrong about a news service that has declared itself Queensland’s savior in the fight against a youth crime rate, with the station appearing intent on reminding us – or is ethat frightening us – nightly that youth crime is a statewide, growing, epidemic that the Palaszczuk government is doing fuck-all about!
Fegan’s apparent commitment to that cause and his unprofessional, unfair and gross exaggeration of the point Brown was making just about sums up why Nine News is now regarded by many as becoming unbalanced and right wing.
Fegan reported that the government had decided to set up an independent committee to look at youth crime and Voice for Victims spokesperson Ben Cannon made some fair comments that the committee was “nothing compared to what we asked for” and Fegan added that it was unsure whether victims would indeed have a place at the table.
All relevant points and the Voice for Victims crowd will be entitled to be cranky if they end up being frozen out of the process.
But the point of this edition of the MGH remains intact. The segment had no-one saying “the government has lied to us”. No one. And the MGH would strongly recommend to the news editors at Nine in Brisbane that they bring into line those writing its nightly promos. They are biased and unprofessional and bring the news service into disrepute.
But as mentioned above, maybe those directors see no problem at all with their promos or the general anti-Labor thrust of their bulletins. And they seem to have a willing partner in the Voice for Victims crowd who continues to blame the government for its “continued inaction”. Maybe the Voice for Victims mob think their best chance of getting their feet under that table rests with calling Palaszczuk and her ministers liars. Good luck with that brand of diplomacy.
They need to be careful they don’t start coming across like their mentor cum patron Channel 9 News; some sort of LNP front that never, ever, gives Labor a fair go.
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