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 ABC’s News Breakfast program yesterday morning banged on that former Deputy Prime Minister ended up lying supine on an inner-Canberra footpath “after appearing to fall off a planter box”.

What absolute, sloppy journalistic tosh! What a misuse of words. Inaccurate and horribly amateurish. There’s not a single frame of video showing the Member for New England “appearing” to slip his lard-arse off any temporary seating device.

Hint for you BUGers out there: if someone appears at your front door, there’s a good chance if you were standing there you saw him do that? Simples.

Mediocre Bytes is unsure whether the claim that he slipped off the planter box came from his missus or from himself but we don’t really care as to its origins.

Joyce did not appear to do any such thing. Repeat: sloppy, inexcusable reporting that’s just plain wrong. “Apparently” might have almost been acceptable. “Claimed” or “said” would have been much better.

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The ABC has been awash of this sloppy, poor journalism a fair bit lately. Poorly trained scribes just using words for words’ sake, perhaps, because they sound good?

Another classic example was its reporting recently when US president Joe Biden “appeared” to mix up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. Biden did no such thing. He mixed them up, as the SMH correctly pointed out on Saturday.

Goodness, gracious! A journalist calling out something exactly as it happened!

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Need another example? Back to yesterday’s News Breakfast program. It had been reporting that Donald Trump had suggested in a campaign speech that that he might, could have – even appeared, perhaps! – to have said it would be okay for Russia to attack NATO countries who have not spent their fair share on defence funding.

Well, once again, no! His words were stronger than that. His invitation to attack was pretty much unqualified.

And once again, it’s like the ABC – either its reporters or those writing lead-ins for presenters – feels the need to modify interpretations of the spoken word of the likes of the Orange Baboon to lessen their impact for some unknown, unexplained and bizarre reasoning that has fuck all to do with the practice of journalism. To be fair – and Mediocre Bytes and its sibling Media Glass House always strive to be – the program later on did say Trump had “encouraged” Putin to attack those NATO allies.

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