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.
The bitter, washed-up, old hacks who compile this column promised some time ago to stop taking the piss out of a Nine News graphics “innovation” started some months ago now – namely the huge map and then the smaller one allegedly showing viewers where the 9 newsroom’s intrepid reporters are beaming from.
But we just can’t resist having one more dig at what we saw immeditely way back when as an absurd, stupid, meaningless “innovation” in news reporting that should have been axed within days of being introduced.
And have there ever been better examples of the absurd, stupid and meaningless nature of this “feature” than the first two stories from Nine Network’s Brisbane newsroom last night – from Flagstone north of Beaudesert during a bushfire treat and from the Princess Alexander Hospital on Brisbane’s southside after a police officer was accidentally shot in the neck at a firing range.
Trust us. Use the two stupid, meaningless, openly laughable, maps to get to where Josh Bavas (shown at top) was standing in Flagstone or where Abbey Geran (below) was reporting from the PA hospital and you’ll never ever get there in a month of Sundays.
Flagstone, not that anyone is interested, is a suburban locality of the City of Logan about 28km north of Beaudesert.
There are laugh-out-loud examples of this just about any night on the Nine Network’s major city newsrooms and we at Mediocre Bytes are sticking with our view that Nine Entertainment Co. chairman Peter Costello must have a grandchild who’s a graphic arts degree student and during some work experience at Nine in Sydney that gifted one came up with this maps idea! If you BUGgers out there can come up with a better reason, let us know.
Finally, we accept that Nine had to come up with some way of allegedly (we’ve thrown that in for an item below) proving where their people were reporting from, having been sprung twice in 2011 pretending that their news helicopter was above the area where Daniel Morcombe was abducted on the Sunshine Coast when they were hovering over the station’s Mount Cooth-tha building on one occasion and on the station’s helipad on the other. Heads rolled over that one.
We just feel that their use of these full-screen news maps, repeated again only smaller and in the right-hand corner, is not the way to go. But until they get rid of this “innovation”, at least we get one to two laughs a night as the maps tell us where Shorncliffe Jetty or the Central Courts building are. Clear as mud!
Have a look if you’re not a regular Nine News watcher. You’ll be laughing along with us most nights.
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Okay. we admit we can be picky so how about this one!
The sports reporter on ABC News Breakfast on Monday morning told us that Wales had led the Australian Wannabees “from the kick off” in their Rugby World Cup clash in Lyon, France.
Now that is simply not true, no matter how woeful our national side might be. Okay! Is! The reality is the Wannabees held out the Welsh for a good three minutes in that match. THREE FULL MINUTES! 0-0 FOR THREE FULL MINUTES!
Go the Wannabees! Go home is what we meant by saying that!
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The washed up, bitter old hacks who compile Mediocre Bytes also often bang on about the overuse or misuse of “alleged” and “allegedly” in the mainstream mediocre.
We’ve misplaced the clipping but we did like the report a wee while back that covered the charging of Donald Trump and 18 other people in Georgia with a total of 41 charges arising out of their alleged attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election result, including conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.
So far so good. But this particular news outlet – and we’ll keep looking for the clipping because it’s quite funny – rightly threw in the word “allegedly” when detailing the claimed offenses against the 19 people but somehow spoiled their attempt at quality journalism by starting the sentence with a reference to “Trump and his 18 co-conspirators”! Oh dear.
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Okay, let’s finish with this morning’s (Thursday’s) ABC News Breakfast that posed two really great questions that were left unanswered.
One: how did weatherman Nate Byrne know to take off a week of Covid leave when he had no symptoms? Does he take a RAT regularly just to be safe. And…
Two: That Solomons Island lass who reported on the annual spear fight between the two rival clans on some far-flung remote island of the Solomons group for failing to address the one big question seeing the two mobs were standing in lines not too far apart and were throwing their weapons with some force, was anyone hurt or worse? One bloke was filmed limping away.
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