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.

In a spoof BUG newsflash we threw up (we often do) online yesterday afternoon, we fiddled with an ABC online news pointer about koalas and turned it into a pisstake of the Liberal Party of Australia, currently in palliative care. (link below).

Just a bit of harmless bit of fun at the expense of a once major political party now in its death throes but we were quickly alerted by our Mediocre Bytes compilers that the ABC pointer on its home page was missing one little tiny word. And they were right, of course. We know the national broadcaster is always battling with a restricted budget so maybe they simply could not afford the “to” that should have been inserted after “bid”.

Picky, picky maybe – as this column sometimes is – but is this not also a much admired news site where professional journalism standards should always be on display?

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Let’s stick with Aunty for this one that might also be just a little picky. But maybe not.

That lovely ex-Irish lass Katherine Murphy on News Breakfast this morning repeatedly referred to Craigieburn as being “north of Melbourne” when reporting about a murder charge being laid after Craigieburn Community Hospital found a 15-year-old boy with stab wounds in its car park on Wednesday night.

Now, courtesy of our remote research hub – okay, so it’s chatGPT! – we’re told that the Melbourne metropolitan area at about 9990 square kilometres is one of the world’s largest, with some suburbs up to 50km from the CBD. Craigieburn is not quite the outer limits, being some 27km north of that CBD. You can get to Flinders Street in about 35 to 40 minutes on a fast train! But enough of that!

Craigiburn clearly is “in Melbourne’s north” not to “the north of Melbourne!” So does this really amount to a hill of beans? In the north of Melbourne or north of Melbourne. Pfffft! And does anyone fucking care what Ms Murphy gets to read out?

Well, MB does. Take your heart, for example. It’s a vital internal organ in the north of your torso. It won’t be doing you too much good if it’s north of your torso, although we have sometimes heard of people having their hearts in their mouths and who still survive.

The washed-up, bitter hacks who compile this column still think the sliding reputation of the once great craft of journalism in Australia can be saved to some extent by its practitioners sticking to cold, hard, facts no matter how picky and trivial they might seem.

Below: someone else at the ABC knows their craft!

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