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.
This column and its more serious sibling, Media Glass House, have often poked fun at modern-day reporters (and, yes, often tyros) who love reinventing the meaning of words as they search for a bit of colour and impact in their reports.
One we’ve enjoyed ribbing over time is the use of “caught in the crossfire”! One of our older bitter and twisted Bytes compilers is old enough to have seen High Noon (1854) when it first came out remains pretty confident that people caught in a crossfire are slap bang – BANG! BANG! – between two combatants or groups firing in each other’s direction.
He’s tickled pink that the modern definition of “crossfire” hasn’t changed over the centuries ….
So let’s now roll the tape from Nine News Queensland last Sunday, where Pat Heagney has joined forces with other scribes apparently keen to redefine that meaning in his report of a shooting at a Logan pub the night before where some disgusting mongrels (our words, not Pat’s) opened fire on people milling on the footpath outside the venue during an interval in local boxing title bouts, hitting four people including a lovely, innocent, 19-year-old girl who tragically has since died in hospital.
For Pat’s education, Logan, south of Brisbane, is not in the US. The boxing fans did not immediately pull out their Saturday night specials or unstrap their high-powered automatic assault weapons and make these cunts (our word, not Pat’s) pay the ultimate price for their villainy.
Our research hasn’t been able to resolve whether there was one firearm discharged (the police view) or that two masked men opened fire from the passenger window (Pat’s take, a day later to be fair). But our compilers are pretty confident, the rounds fired from one or more guns travelled across the short distance from the same position. If that’s a crossfire, Angus Taylor and Barnaby Joyce’s bottom teeth don’t need fixing.
And our Bytes compilers kept their fingers crossed that someone at Nine News Queensland explained to Pat exactly what a crossfire means so the same mistake wouldn’t be made in last Monday’s follow-up.
Oh, dear. Maybe when Pat got to work last Tuesday, some veteran at the newsroom would have set him straight.
For our part, we might send Pat this photo of ex-Army Major Nidal Hasan, scheduled to be executed by a military firing squad on December for murdering 12 soldiers and a civilian and wounding some 30 others at the US Fort Hood military base.
The good news is that Hasan has no chance of being executed in a cross-fire. The bad news for the former army psychiatrist is that he will still be dead, though, as some of the rifles fired in the same direction at him will contain a live round, if that’s the way these sorts of things are still done.
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Australia has enjoyed, if that’s the correct word, a metric measurement system for nigh on 50-plus years, according to the bitter old bastards who help our Media Glass House researchers compile this column.
Perhaps somebody might walk to their nearest red PMG footpath telephone booth, put a florin in the slot in the black box, ring the people at the ABC News Online website, and push button A when their call is answered, and advise them of that simple fact.
Perhaps after that information is delivered we may not read paragraphs such as the one below drawn from a story about a murder case currently under way in the Supreme Court in Brisbane.
To our MGH superannuated advisory hacks the use of “acres” stands out like canine gonads.
Perhaps if a quick conversion of the figure was not possible, the ABC should have aimed for consistency by reporting the life insurance policy as being worth £435,000 and the couple’s property being valued at £1.3 million?
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