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.

Our most recent Mediocre Bytes column was devoted entirely to silly little errors by dear old Aunty and sadly we can fill our another post exclusively with sloppy work by our national broadcaster.

The one that gave us a welcome brief chuckle at what was a very sad time was the ABC’s online front-page link to its story announcing the sad passing of that wonderful First Nations Australian Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue (below).

We trust all you BUGers out there – being the intelligent, logical, sensible beings you all are – would have spotted in a flash the absurd stupidity of such a post. That’s one helluva meaningless warning to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community!

Our main beef is that this home-page plug stayed online for ever and ever, meaning no-one at Aunty spotted the insensibility and illogicality of the post tease and did anything to change it.

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Look, here’s one where we are going to have to trust our ears because we can’t fact-check the ABC’s Morning Breakfast program on Iview.

But we’re pretty sure we heard a much-loved, moustache-wearing sports presenter saying after Australia had beaten the West Indies by 83 runs at the SCG that the home side had cleaned up the two-match series.

If we’ve heard right, he has completely forgotten it was a three-match series and that the third one-dayer was played at Manuka Oval in Canberra the other day. Then again, maybe he foresaw what a lopsided game it turned out to be – a record thrashing at home with the smallest number of balls bowled as Australia romped to an eight-wicket win long before dusk – and was right to ignore it!

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Okay, picky picky! But it’s true that we could fill a Mediocre Bytes column every bloody day if we could monitor both Aunty and commercial channels pumping out news programs and spot the literals in their straps running across the bottom of screens.

And so it was on the ABC News Breakfast the other morning that we pondered what a perscribed burn might look like?

We just hope we’re not coming across overly critical as we prehaps a little perdictably presecute our case for Aunty to lift its journalism standards right across its various platforms. Or prehaps that big money injection promised by the Albanese government to restore Aunty to its former professional glory hasn’t started to flow yet?

And, yes, we’re pretty sure that amusing literal was maintained for the entire News Breakfast program, which once again for Mediocre Bytes is the greater sin than, hopefully, a simple typing error (rather than a staffer who just can’t spell!) being made in the first place.

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