#21 in a series

The media 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.

Actually, we just made up that number above. But we’ve done a fair few of these over the years. A bit of fun with the words our news hounds use in their reports that some of youse BUGgers out there might rate as “just a bit picky, picky”.

But the bitter, twisted, washed-up, old hacks who compile this column and its more serious sibling Media Glass House don’t care. A bit like 1939 in Hollywood movies, they think they saw the golden age of journalism in Oz! Enough with the immodesty!

Let’s look at an example from just this morning. Arianna Levy, the very competent journo who reports from Brisbane for ABC News Breakfast, told us that a north Queensland hotel had been “completely inundated”.

Our compilers checked with an old mate of theirs, AI, who drummed up a definition of “completely inundated” that they all showed they agreed with by a clink of their rum-and-coke glasses. This. Completely inundated describes a state of being entirely covered, submerged, or overwhelmed by water or an excessive volume of things. It implies that an area is submerged, such as homes or streets filled by floodwaters, or a person/system is overwhelmed.

Every mainstream media report we’ve looked at definitely shows that the Einasleigh Hotel in far-norff Queensland town was definitely inundated (photo at top and below, by Nardeen Hayden).

The publican reported chairs floating about which is always a good sign of things happening that match that exact description. The Billinudgel Hotel in northern NSW knows a lot about similar inundations.

But no image we’ve accessed shows the hotel completely inundated. Hint: such a situation would make life for drinkers on the roof waiting for air rescue just a little problematic. Especially if the flood was in full flow.

Our MB research suggests that Arianna Levy is not alone in throwing in this “completely inundated” descriptor even if it’s quite wrong.

The 2016 ABC report above is quite instructive. A whole suburb completely inundated!

Which gives us one final chance to stress what we’re on about here. If sometime down the track, we hear Arianna Levy reporting on a flood that has completely inundated the highest building in the Brisbane CBD, we’ll know immediately that even suburbs with “heights” in their names are in a whole lot of bother.

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Here’s one from Nine News Queensland’s 6pm bulletin last night (Tuesday). Reporter Pat Heaney covering a fatal plane crash in Jacobs Well yesterday morning said a bushfire had been “sparked by the collision”.

Look, perhaps Pat had used “crash” earlier in his report so thought a change to collision wasn’t a bad idea for variety and to show off his wide vocabulary. But our MB compilers have never, ever, heard of a plane colliding with the ground. In their day – back when maybe cadet counsellors were a thing or sub-editors could have a quiet word – our BTWUOHs were taught that two moving objects collide. And that using the right word a few times is the way to go.

It’s quite a sad thing, then, that the bushland the plane crashed into didn’t have the ability to quickly get out of the way.

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