The most important show of the week - besides Neighbours.

Media Watch! My only gripe with this show is that it is only 10 minutes long, and that I suspect it largely preaches to the converted. As such, it leaves me feeling kind of hollow when it reports on the appalling practices of some elements of the Australian media. While I am all the wiser for knowing this, I, like most viewers of media watch, am not one of the people reading these papers, or watching these shows. Although now I think about it, this makes perfect sense. It is hard to imagine how someone could be a regular media watch viewer while still continuing to switch on the Ch 10 news, sixty minutes, or read Melbourne's Herald Sun, or Sydney's Daily Telegraph.

In the last year or so I have become increasingly interested in how the media reports important issues. Its a shame I wasn't interested back in year 12, when I had to write an essay on the topic! For anyone else who is similarly interested, perhaps we can start a bit of a media tips competition. It would work like this: Each week we submit possible media slip-ups and plain bad reporting practices that media watch might include in the following week's show. One point for each correct guess. Of course, you can increase your chances by actually emailing media watch, which I suspect is how they become aware of most things they report on.

Last night I scored one point, which is well above my average of .. well .. 0.

My tip was that media watch would have a go at Ch 10 late news when on August 1 (last week), they reported the story of a young American male who fell out of a Ferris wheel seat. In the lead up to the story, the enticing news headline used was:

"After the break, a man falls from a Ferris wheel, but did he survive the tumble down?"

When I heard this last week, I thought it was just appalling, but figured he must have survived because surely no one would use a such a tragic death, in this cheap and tasteless way in order to keep the viewers watching - and, on this occasion at least, this belief seemed to be correct. The man escaped with only minor injuries. While, of course, this in no way justifies Ch 10's tactics for keeping the punters watching, I was just relieved that our media had not sunk to such murky depths to exploit someone's tragic death for ratings.

This relief, however, was completely blown out of the water when I watched media watch last night. On May 20, 2005, Channel 10 ran with a similar headline for another unfortunate event involving a hot air balloon catching on fire while in the air, carrying two passengers:


"And coming up later, two people were on this balloon when disaster struck, but would they get out alive?"

They did not.