This column never tires of having fun with tyros – and, trust us, they are mainly the young ‘uns but sadly not always – who love using colourful language and words that sound bloody good even if their meaning really doesn’t suit the story being covered.

So let’s run the tape on Monday’s Nine News Queensland 6pm bulletin.

Here’s newsreader Aislin Kriuelis (also at top) introducing a yarn about a plane crash: “A student pilot has escaped the unthinkable after the plane he was flying crashed and burst into flames at an airport in Adelaide”.

The unthinkable? One of the washed up, old hacks who compile this crap suggested perhaps that was the name of the plane?

Nah, he is a silly old bugger who’s not as rum-tolerant as he used to be. Was it unthinkable that a plane can sometimes crash? It’s happened before. No, the unthinkable must be that no-one could possibly think that the pilot could escape a plane that burst into flames on impact.

To get to the bottom of this thinkable analysis, let’s hear from the reporter on the ground, Samantha Hogan.”… but against the odds (the unthinkable odds?) the pilot walked out of the inferno and onto the runway alive and unscathed”.

We suspect that’s thinkably unbelievable. Our best hunch is that the plane did not burst into flames immediately. That if the pilot had walked out of an inferno, he would have at least been scathed – well, burnt hair at least. Sans eyebrows? And walked? Really? What a cool, calm collected trainee pilot he must have been. And only in his early 20s! Just about anyone else would have jumped!

Why are the unwise old heads at Mediocre Bytes going on like this? Back in their day as police roundsmen (please don’t respond; that’s what they were called back then!) they tried to talk to people who had walked out of a house inferno. Very difficult to get a few punchy pars from someone in ICU or the morgue.

In this case, we suspect there’s a fair bit of thinkably colourful writing going on there to put some real impact and heat into the story. But has Samantha crashed and burned here?

As we’ve often declared ten-million times before, logic and common sense play a big role in creating very good journos. Some time soon, a little warning bell will ring in Samantha’s head when she thinks words like “walked out of the inferno and onto the runway alive and unscathed” are worth airing. Ditto for the Nine reporter a while back who had fishermen clinging to the hull of their very submerged boat as they awaited rescue. Ding! Ding! Ding!

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What, you want more?

Given the blatant multi-million level hyperbole we’ve deliberately used above, guess what the very first words were that came out of Aislin Kriuelis’s mouth to introduce the very next item?

Of course, you can’t do that! Here they are: “We have heart-stopping vision of drivers dicing with death on inundated north Queensland roads…”

Luckily the video was behind Aislin so she survived to finish the bulletin.

And at least she didn’t use “incredible vision” which crops up every now and then on such bulletins. That sort of shit really has our column compilers gobsmacked, jaw-dropped and shaking their heads violently in unbelievable disbelief that’s very close to being incredible.

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