Well, maybe it was two. Or possibly just one!

Here’s Andrew Lofthouse on Nine News Queensland beginning last night’s 6pm service with this: “Tonight, a hero neighbour pulls a family of five from a fierce Ipswich blaze.”

And then his intro to the story itself: “Five people have been rushed to hospital following an out- of-control caravan fire near Ipswich.

Take it away, tag-teaming Melissa Downes: “A Camira man labelled a hero after pulling two men from the flames.”

A family of five down to two men in a matter of seconds! Mate, we don’t know who you are but five, or two, you’re still a hero to the Media Glass House compilers who have never done a brave thing in their lives.

Maybe reporter Bailey Kenzie can shed light on just how many this wonderful neighbour saved.

Kenzie: “The chilling screams of a mother who is trapped inside this burning caravan with her husband and two children. Okay, that’s four then. Not five. Further clarification please.

Kenzie: “It could have been much worse except for a hero neighbour who ran into the flames!”

Maybe a witness can shed light on the extent of this hero’s efforts: “He is the hero. He went in there, full of smoke. He put his life in danger to pull a man out.”

So that’s one then? We may as well believe him because it’s instructive that at no stage in his report does Bailey Kenzie quantify the number of people our hero saved. Only Andrew Lofthouse and Melissa Downes seem to have plucked “a family of five” and “two men” respectively as our hero’s tally.

But here’s the best guess of the bitter, washed-up old hacks that compile this column. If the family was trapped inside the caravan with it ablaze to the extent Kenzie clearly suggests it was, aided by the vision below, no-one would have been rushed to hospital with “the father and another man suffering serious burns to their faces; mum and the kids treated for smoke inhalation”.

In the absence of the sort of hard, cold, or in this case hot facts that one might expect from a professional news service, we can only assume the wife and kids got out early and our hero may or may not have helped the two men who supposedly made up the family of five when it wasn’t just four. Unless the hero also suffered face burns. Or he’s involved in saving the father and an earlier neighbourly hero who has been left unsung? It’s all very confusing, isn’t it?

The bottom line is: who the fuck wrote the lead-ins delivered by our two hapless news-reading veterans?

We have banged away relentlessly over time over the very creative writers who pen the shit that pops up on the autocues of Andrew Lofthouse and Melissa Downes. And in the outrageous, over-the-top and highly inaccurate pre-6pm promos leading up to bulletins.

Some of those promos, especially those plugging youth crime, have read like LNP talking points that had little to no resemblance to what the actual bulletins ran with.

On this latest example, we once again implore the senior management at Nine News Queensland to counsel/discipline those who write the shit poor old Andrew and Melissa are forced to let dribble from their mouths. Oh, and have a stern word with dear young Bailey if he had anything to do with scripting the words uttered by our two news anchors.

Want to be alerted immediately a new blog hits Australia’s longest running and most offensive satire site? Simply click on the Follow sign or the link below to be emailed new yarns the moment they are uploaded! The very second we go far too far – and trust us we will – you can then quickly unfollow via the three dots!

Follow The Bug Online on WordPress.com