Where’s the pride in your work, James Massola?

That burning urge you should possess to always show your readers the extent of your professionalism as a very senior journalist driven by an obsessive need to get your facts right?

In the cover story in today’s The Sydney Morning Herald News Review section, barely a few paragraphs in, you say that Barnaby Joyce was pictured on that Canberra footpath with “his feet on a planter box”.

Do you know, James Massola, what two of the compilers of this column blurted out immediately as they read that this morning? “Bullshit!” They didn’t even have to check the footage taken on the night to know Joyce indeed had both feet firmly planted – not on a planter box – but on the ground at all times.

Look, we all make mistakes but let us explain why we’ve elevated this mistake to this, our senior media-watch column, and not its younger sibling, Mediocre Bytes that deals with the silly little hiccups in our once highly respected craft.

We have no idea how you’ve gotten to see something that wasn’t there to be seen in the first place.

But our beef goes wider than the kindest explanation of a simple brain fade. Ignorance on your part, James, is another perfectly reasonable explanation . If our column compilers – who do this for fucking free, mind – can blurt out “bullshit!” the moment they see such a glaring factual error, where the fuck were the SMH sub/s who should have come to your rescue, immediately deleted those half a dozen totally inaccurate words and who simply muttered an immodest ‘lucky I was here to help” as they continued on their duties?

POSTSCRIPT: James Massola has been spotted coming out of a Sydney Specsavers store early this morning. We hope he took with him any of the sub-editors or check subs or page proof readers who handled his copy. That’s if any of these production people still exist.

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