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.
Over time, this column and its media review sibling Media Glass House have questioned the common practice by public and commercial news rooms to spare us the actual graphic moment when people die in disasters, such as when two aircraft collide in the air or, in a recent case, when a business jet nosedives into terra firma and 11 crew and passengers are vaporised in a nano-second.
In one such mid-air disaster overseas, we sensitive and easily shocked souls were typically spared across the networks the actual moment when that military helicopter and the passenger jet collided over Washington in early 2025 and all on board both craft perished at that moment or soon after when the machines crashed into the Potomac River.
We have pondered whether we’re spared the exact moment of such deaths because white, privileged, people we don’t know have lost their lives, compared with the recent floods in Nepal where we watched the very moment a building collapsed on a group of local folk. They weren’t waiting on the bank of a raging river for swimming lessons.
It was fairly obvious that death would have been fairly instant for some of those souls but we got to see it, perhaps because their friends and relatives were very unlikely to see legal redress for the pain and suffering the video has caused them.
Let’s go back to that business jet that decided to land at speed at basically a 90-degree angle, something not at all recommended by its manufacturers and designers. Nine News Queensland in its pre-bulletin touts and at the start of the 6pm program clearly stopped the video moments before the fiery impact. In the report that followed, a long-range shot of the entire sequence was shown but from quite a distance. After that, the video was stalled to spare us that horrific moment and then the blast was shown.
Over at the ABC, viewers of its 7pm Queensland bulletin were warned in advance of the graphic video to follow, and the impact with the ground was shown and in more closeup than the earlier blink-and-you’d-miss-it Nine clip. So maybe the rules are changing, if the following example is also any guide?
Earlier this month, both those networks showed the exact moment when two helicopters collided near Mount Everest in Nepal, causing one death, an Indian national. So discarding the very strong possibility he wasn’t white and his death was okay to watch, the question still needs to be asked: is a change in the air and on the ground as to how such disasters are covered?
Are the people who still watch early-evening news services old enough and mature enough and close enough to dying of old age and who have had countless disasters in their own lives be trusted enough to watch moments of disaster in which people of many colours die without being scarred for what’s left of their lives?
We’ll keep you posted.
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