The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.

This column has had a lot of fun over a long, long time now about the shameless clickitty-baitty style plugs that someone up at Nine News Queensland uses to promote each night’s 6pm bulletin.

Penned by someone we suspect couldn’t spell the word journalist, they are often outlandish and inaccurate and are used for the 4pm news and then run relentlessly during Tipping Point for the main hour-long news.

And some over time have sounded like plugs out of LNP head office. To be fair to the newsreaders they are often not repeated once the bulletin gets under way. Here’s a recent one that was.

A wee while ago, in the station’s 4pm news and all through Tipping Point came the teaser of a multi-million-dollar, 15-car heist with the blazing, screen-wide heading “Gone in 60 seconds!” We particularly liked the plug near the end of Tipping Point with those extra large words: “In just four minutes!” That, of course, referred to how far the story was away but we accept it could have been very confusing to viewers now on the edge of their seats waiting for the full facts!

And when Melissa read the lead-in items, there it was: “Fifteen south-east cars stolen in 60 seconds heist!” When the item ran a few minutes later, Melissa dropped the Gone in 60 Seconds! theme and reporter Pat Heagney made no mention of it in his yarn of an overnight weekend theft of all those cars at Willawong near Ipswich.

Which was probably for the best. We reckon our click-bait plugger should stick to promoting unreal TV shows and stay well away from what should be the only reality show on our idiot boxes – news bulletins!

As it turns out, the theft of the cars took many hours – from around midnight to 9am – just like – ooh, wah! – the heist in the oddly named Gone in 60 Seconds movie from the year 2000.

We’ll stick with our view that a nod to a movie series without any explanation as to why that’s been done was not a sound idea from a professional news outlet.

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