Today our Media Glass House teams wanted to bring their loyal reader a few quick-fire items of interest that they have spied in various outlets in the past week or so.

We start with The Courier-Mail – the daily newsletter published by the Bowen Hills branch of the Liberal National Party (main picture) – which has been echoing past LNP glories in its coverage leading up to the October 26 Queensland election.

Our MGH researchers noticed the familiar sentiment contained in the heading above a recent editorial (below) that ran in conjunction with stories critical of the rise in public sector job numbers under the Labor Party state government since it took office in 2015.

Achieving the “right size public sector” was a core promise of the LNP government of Campbell Newman. (below)

The LNP, when last in office, tried to achieve the promised “right size” by sacking 14,000 public sector workers, a move that helped it depart office in 2015 despite having won 78 out of 89 seats at the 2012 election.

Hmmm, mused our MGH teams, with friends like The Courier-Mail reminding voters of such memories, who needs enemies?

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Speaking of The Courier-Mail, here’s a supposedly playful front-page headline that it ran last week.

Our MGH researchers suggest that the heading, on top of a story about the dangers posed to young people by their overuse of the TikTok app – which they assume was meant to evoke a “TikTokking” time bomb – didn’t quite hit the spot.

Although one of our researchers did point out that “tiking” may still be valid, and possibly clever, since the story was canvassing the threats faced by Australian tikes.

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This one won’t take long. Our MGH teams just wanted their reader to be aware that Adam Creighton, who is usually the Washington correspondent of the Murdoch media’s national turdbloid, The Australian, is apparently still on extended leave allowing him to work as a publicist for Donald Trump’s campaign.

No doubt his leave application was personally signed by Rupert “I put my profits before democracy” Murdoch.

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Another quickie. Our MGH researchers suggest you take a short glance at just the headline of this article and try to guess exactly what the big hardware chain’s strategy involves.

They suggest that if you guessed “Continuing to sell cheap and shoddy Chinese-made crap at hugely marked-up prices” you wouldn’t be alone.

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Advertisements don’t usually feature in our Media Glass House, but our research teams could not resist drawing attention to the one below for those expensive CPAP machines designed to tackle sleep apnoea which our MGH researchers consider to be little more than grossly overpriced fish tank pumps.

They wonder if former cricket great Merv Hughes (below) had all the details of the endorsement deal he signed fully explained to him before he agreed to sign.

If so, our MGH teams wonder how he missed the clause in the deal that stated he agreed to appear looking “absolutely and embarrassingly fucking stupid”.

No doubt the wording may have been a tad more legalistic than that.

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Finally, here’s the type of item that tends to annoy some of our more pedantic members of our Media Glass House analysis teams, which at best guess would be 98% of them.

The ABC Online item was just one report carried by numerous outlets about the passing of “the world’s oldest living person”. It’s the type of report that occurs fairly regularly as people across the globe aged well over 100 fade away.

But some of our researchers say the presentation of such items is all wrong and that the news should be broken as “the world’s former oldest living person has died..etc…etc…”

They cite the principle behind the saying “the king is dead, long live the king” as evidence that once the oldest person dies there is automatically and instantaneously a new oldest person still kicking and coverage should be tailored accordingly.

They have even managed to put their case before The Bug’s independent editorial standards board which issued a succinct ruling: “Pedantic pricks.”

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