Is Nine News Queensland having a lens of us?

That’s the question the compilers of this column legitimately asked after Thursday night’s 6pm bulletin out of Brisbane repeatedly showed the image of what viewers were entitled to think was the camera a young girl at a north Brisbane school found hidden in the school’s pool change room.

The story teases at the start of the bulletin finished with this: “Parent outrage at a webcam hidden inside a school change room”.

With this image…

Well done, Nine. What a scoop. Especially when the GoPro camera shown appears to be recording!

We now move forward to just before the last ad break, where newsreader Andrew Lofthouse says: “In just three minutes, the local girls who found a hidden camera in a pool change room at their south-east school. Their furious parents told to keep it secret from the public.”

Here’s two of the images to go with that promo.

Once again, well done, Nine News Queensland! What a scoop!

But hold on. This camera doesn’t look all that hidden, does it? No wonder ONE girl – not girls – found it!

The story, when it finally lobbed just before 7pm, had reporter Pat Heagney explaining that “a student found the hidden webcam almost two weeks ago”.

“Parents have no idea how it got there or what may have been recorded.”

He reported that police were investigating but had “found no images or recordings stored on the device” and “no memory card has been found”.

“It’s unclear whether the webcam might have been streaming online at any stage.”

Hmmm. It might also be possible with everything we’ve now been told that no images were ever taken of these kids. Let’s hope so for everyone’s sake.

Our beef is that in the absence of any disclaimer, Nine News Queensland is letting its viewers assume the camera the bulletin repeatedly shows is the one the school kid found.

The Nine version is certainly not hidden; nor is there any real possibility that Nine News has somehow managed to either take – or be handed later – the image of the offending camera in situ before it was handed to school staff almost two weeks ago.

A fair slice of the reporter’s yarn centres around the anger of one parent about what can reasonably be argued were stupid attempts by the school to request parents say nothing in order to keep the incident hidden from the public and that’s fair enough.

But the repeated use of the image of a camera, clearly presented as the one found in the change room, is pretty sloppy journalism in our view.

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