Today’s MGH column is devoted to yet another useless, incompetent, unprofessional sub-editor at The Sydney Morning Herald. No! Not the subs who don’t know what to call their page 3!

This is a fresh beef. But some background first.

As you can see from above and below, the LNP opposition with more than a little help from compliant media has been accusing the Albanese government for quite some time of not completing a single home under its Housing Australia Future Fund.

At left is some right-wing LNP-news organ we’ve never heard of fully backing the Opposition’s zero homes built claim. At right, Michael Sukkar, Shadow Minister for Housing, proudly pushes the same claim by LNP news organ, The Daily Telegraph.

Then on Tuesday, two journos at the SMH – Shane Wright and Millie Murai – basically called those zero claims dead wrong.

Oooh, wah! Someone’s telling us fibs! The trust or the Libs? A very naughty trust? Or the latter with the uncritical help from a compromised, right-wing, shit mediocre?

That online report on Tuesday ran with the scoop of the fund’s progress on building these affordable houses, with the figures to be released by the fund on Wednesday.

That report formed the basis of the reporters’ story in the printed SMH on Thursday, with a full analysis of the numbers of completed projects, those under way and those planned. A crude summary of their story that had all the basic figures spot on and well done to both of them? The LNP’s claim of no houses completed is a fucking, redhot porkie! Our paraphrasing there.

So back to where we started. A sub-editor plopped their sorry, uneducated, arse down for a shift on Wednesday night and came up with this heading.

Given the SMH‘s readership, some will probably have died of old age before they got past this heading. Was that the sub’s intention – or hope? And why cherry-pick a Lib line buried well down in the yarn?

Either way, they showed a complete ignorance of the work their paper’s scribes had done on this issue, and what Thursday’s yarn screamed out to be told with a heading to match. Who the fuck would think a free plug for an LNP lie would suit the general thrust of that article?

Just for the interest of you BUGgers out there, one of the tired, bitter, old hacks who compile the MGH spent about half a minute to come up with what he thinks would have been the rightful heading.

Half a fucking minute! But, as he admits, he is very rusty and out of practice. And please excuse us for not being able to copy the font used by the SMH. The Bug still uses Corel Draw 4 to create our graphics. A pretty limited fonts library there.

Our final point. If this is how a supposedly professional, balanced “independent” news organisation is going to frame things, Albanese and Labor must be dreading what they’ll be facing from just about the entire mainstream mediocre in the months ahead.

No wait. One more about those amazing subs at the SMH!

Last night, one sub thought the very best line to extract from Peter Hartcher’s column in today’s (Saturday’s) SMH was the breakout circled below.

That comment appeared in the second last par of Hartcher’s call-to-arms spiel.

Tomorrow, the MGH will dissect that piece of political nonsense from Hartcher. Our personal view is that he should be kicked out of the Herald’s North Sydney office so hard he splashes down the other side of Norfolk Island.

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