In all the years that The Bug’s two media review columns – Media Glass House and Mediocre Bytes – have taken the piss out of news media fuckups, small and large, the one we are sharing here is … sorry, Ned Ryerson, what’s that? …

.. that’s right, Ned! An absolute doozey!

We love it on so many levels. The fuck-up is kinda funny given its obvious ignorance of facts. It has the added bonuses of having a rare dig at the ABC’s Media Watch – what we do but only once a week and not all year – and has the rare distinction of possibly shutting down meat production in Australia and leaving the nation’s supermarket meat chillers bare.

Let us explain. In covering a legal stoush between a Victorian abattoir and an animal welfare rights group, Media Watch fill-in host Julia Baird gave full and unqualified support for a Seven Border News report that hidden cameras installed by the Farm Transparency Project in the Game Meats Company’s abattoir had, in Baird’s words “allegedly captured cruelty in the kill area”.

The Seven news reporter had, some weeks back presumably, broken the news with this: “Seven has seen the video showing goats having their throats cut while they appeared to still be alive”. The journo declared this might have breached federal government regulations. The meat-processors said their processes were fair and lawful.

Baird clearly accepted the reporter’s “still alive” claim as logical, balanced, professional journalism by adding this: “So why did Seven leave out what surely must have been the most compelling part of its report”.

We’re compelled to debunk such compellation, even if that word doesn’t exist. Putting aside the legal battle going on about whether the video can be made public, The Bug is here to help out Baird and that Seven reporter with some of the basic rules that apply to slaughtering livestock in Oz, be it cattle, sheep, pigs, game meats and goldfish. Okay, maybe not goldfish.

Slaughtermen through the ages … well, at least since the invention of the knife or similar cutting object… have bled animals – they stick them – to kill them and improve meat quality. In modern times, we are far, far, kinder and stun animals with a bolt gun (or use other means) to render them unconscious so they feel no pain as they bleed out. Even chooks go through a soothing, relaxing water bath before they get the big stick.

To state the bleeding obvious, a dead animal doesn’t bleed out. Cutting a dead goat’s throat makes absolutely no sense. Heartless even. Okay, enough with the word plays.

The Bug simply hopes it’s on very safe grounds by declaring that those goats in that Victorian abattoir were very much alive – but thankfully unconscious – as they made their sad and once-in-a-lifetime kill-floor appearance. If they weren’t made unconscious, maybe it was a kosher or halal slaughterhouse?

It’s not rocket surgery, is it?

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