We at The Bug are very, very excited this morning … and no, it’s not because it’s Saturday and we get double our normal pay for weekend work. We do and we don’t, if you get our drift.

The excitement is purely because we think we have a brand-new award category to honour the very worst in Australian mainstream mediocre journalism; one that will be a natural fit with existing long-standing gongs including the Media Glass House Arse-Licker monthly and yearly presentations; ditto the Beatup of the month and year awards and our uncoveted Joseph Goebbels trophy awarded mainly around election times.

We’ve instructed our creative people to work with our regular trophy suppliers so let’s give a big welcome to The Bug’s MGH STRAPON (Strap Old News) Award, clearly devoted to our electronic mediocre platforms.

And we won’t have a competition with June almost at its end but once it arrives – the STRAPON trophy, not July – we’ll be handing over the inaugural Strap Old News Award for June 2025 to the ABC’s Weekend Breakfast for this unfast, un-news breaking strap showing at top and below.

That’s right. Despite all the extra funding supposedly splashed Aunty’s way since Labor came to power federally in 2022, the ABC can’t afford to have graphics arts people hired at the weekend, so viewers this morning had to put up with a chyron (we just couldn’t resist the old-fashioned word for newsstraps just to impress Dean Felton!) that’s about as stale as that half-empty cleansing ale longneck Barnaby Joyce always leaves on his bedside table overnight, namely where Australia was placed at the end of day two of the first Test against the West Indies.

That happened so long ago now Donald Trump has probably obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities a second time in between. And Israel has reluctantly killed another 100 Gazan who foolishly looked like they were about to approach its soldiers, their skeletal hands brandishing empty food bowls.

What that newsstrap should have been showing is that on the third day of play, Australia’s lower-order had once again covered for our hopelessly out of touch top-order and had gotten the Aussies to an almost respectable 310 on a wearing pitch and as Weekend Breakfast unfolded, the West Indies were quickly six, then seven, then eight down and heading for a sizable defeat.

Who knew that the ABC was so committed to being more like an old-fashioned printed newspaper, providing yesterday’s news tomorrow?

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