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.

This column over time has had much fun when The Sydney Morning Herald and its sister Sun-Herald shamelessly flog off their look and their principles to some advertiser that takes the four-page wraparound and forces the masthead to cobble together a faux front cover.

Such editions then tie themselves in knots by being inconsistent with what they then call the proper front-page inside. Sometimes it’s page one; sometimes page three. And subs have difficulty remembering which is which. When stories are continued on an inside page, it’s often labelled From front page, which confuses both themselves and readers further.

But we thought today’s Sun Herald broke new ground in prostituting itself to the almighty advertising dollar. We at Mediocre Bytes are not quite sure whether this has happened before, but the paper’s senior editors simply couldn’t agree on what the edition’s splash would be.

As you can see from above (top, left), the Israeli incursions into Gaza was the No 1 item on the shithouse looking, hastily cobbled together front-page. The subs who laid out the real front page inside thought Uni chiefs denouncing some ‘Robin Hood’ tax deserved top billing. By the way, even that turned out to be possibly the world’s longest ever write-off itself.

As it also turned out, the Israeli incursion yarn only ended up as a write-off on the inside front cover as well, with the real story on Page 2. Well, page 2 on this edition. Monday’s SMH if it has a Hardly Normal wraparound might have the real inside cover folioed as page 3 with the full story run on page 4 that in a normal paper would be page 2.

Got a headache, you BUGers out there? So have we.

***

Ordinarily, treading with caution is a very commendable trait in journalism.

But we will take exception with this ABC online plug (above) as it appeared late yesterday afternoon for the dreadfully sad death of Lilie James in Sydney.

Suspected murder, ABC? At this point in time, many hours had passed since the lovely young woman’s body was found in the school gymnasium, with “confronting” head injuries and it had been fully reported that the man she had had a brief affair with, the one seen following her into the building and leaving alone, and who had phoned 000 to say where she could be found had clearly killed himself by jumping off cliffs in Sydney’s east. Pity he hadn’t done that first.

MGH reckons it was more than safe enough to drop the “suspected”, especially seeing the headline also “spotlights violence against women”.

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