… to ongoing ridicule

“Look, if those poor kids have been drowned, let’s just hope their fucking stupid dad was too!”

That could easily have been the typical response from any of the washed-up old hacks who compile this column while watching the pre-6pm plugs for Nine News Queensland on Tuesday.

They could have been commenting on the many promos pitching the story of the “doomed bar crossing! ” replete with vision of the doomed tinnie containing the doomed man and his doomed two boys (at top).

But they didn’t, of course. They instinctively knew that the promo would be one of Nine’s typical overblown, click-baiting, unjournalistic attempts at gaining an audience regardless of the actual story to be broadcast.

Here’s a typical definition of “doomed” and anyone watching the promos during Tipping Point would be totally warranted in believing that bar crossing was very ill-fated indeed. How many died!!!!

So did all that hypebole and doom-predicting make it to the actual bulletin at 6pm?

Andrew Lofthouse’s opening news highlights gambit…“A boatload of children caught in a heart stopping bar crossing” … was the first hint that maybe things weren’t as dire as the pre-bulletin promos had made out.

More so when it took until 10.26 minutes into the bulletin for Lofthouse’s intro to declare: “Well, tonight, we can show you the heart-stopping moment a man and two young boys almost capsize their boat in rough surf on the Gold Coast.”

Almost capsize! Bloody hell!

We then heard from reporter Pat Heagney that the father finally realised his error, turned the tinnie around and with the help of another boatie managed it back to safety with those on board “suffering only cuts and cruises”.

So who to blame for the horrendous beatup promos for the segment? And indeed, did Pat Heagney write the voiceovers for poor, dear, Andrew Lofthouse? Or even that pre-6pm bullshit?

Regardless, here’s a couple of other niggling points our washed-up old hacks noticed.

At no time did the tinnie “plunge beneath the waves” as declared by Lofthouse. Doomed might indeed have been the right word to use if that had happened. Chances of that tinnie resurfacing if it had “plunged beneath the waves”? Zilcharonnie, most likely.

And did the incident happen on the Gold Coast, Andrew? Well, no, it was at the Brunswick bar in NSW. Heagney got that bit right. Calling the Brunswick bar as being on the Gold Coast, distance-wise, is akin to calling Wynnum or Cleveland part of the Gold Coast.

And something needed rewriting before suggesting that the two young boys played any role in almost capsizing their little vessel. That was all the work of their stupid dad.

So apart from the horrendous overuse of doomed, a couple of glaring errors of fact and poor sentence structure apportioning blame at young kids where it logically should not be pointed, it was just your typical professional effort we’ve all come to expect from Nine News Queensland.

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