Tomatoes at Central/Sydney Terminal.

Here you have it, third-rate media watch (after first-rate Mediawatch and second-rate Mediawatch a la The Glasshouse).

It's the story that has taken the city of Sydney by storm: the tale of the train-track tomatoes. A tomato bush laden with fruit has been spotted growing between Platforms seven and eight at Central Station and yesterday's Terrorgraph ran the story.

The Daily Telegraph, March 17 2005.

I have the shits with this article. Well I have the shits with the whole newspaper but lets just stick to this particular excuse for journalism for the moment.

First shits: The Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 'broke' the story on Monday (March 14th) and solved the question of the tomato's origin on Wednesday (March 16th) while The Terror was still clueless on Thursday when it ran the story (March 17th). It's typical of Murdoch's rag, really: latch on to news once it's days old.

Second shits: Mainly pedantics but nonetheless typical of Terror reporting [emphasis added].

• "Commuters are baffled by the plant's appearance among the weeds and blackened coal." -- Last I checked, coal-burning steam locomotives weren't used on regular passenger trains - not since the 1970s at least. Methinks reporter Vanessa McCausland refers to the stone ballast that supports the track structure. Hardly combustible as fuel, I'd imagine. And not only does she doesn't mention the 'black coals' once, she does it twice! Gah!
  
• "...somewhere between platform six and seven at Sydney's Central Station a little bit of nature is sprouting happily." -- Newsflash: there are no tracks between platforms six and seven: both of then form the single island platform between the tracks!
  

I know these are just trivial mistakes but false facts and misinformation are nonetheless unacceptable in the media. How can you expect a news outlet to proved reliable news pieces when they can't even check simple facts? I mean, if they can't deal with a small, insignificant story, what are they doing with the big important ones?

So not only was The Terrorgraph late with the news, they were inaccurate about it too! Meh, that's old news as well.

As to the tomato bush's origins? Seeds in human faeces from discharged train carriage toilets.


So that was my attempt at being a media hack. I shouldn't quit my day job, eh?

Listening to:
Title: Boys
Artist: DJ Jonny Moirée
Album/station: http://bo.gs/jonny/singles/boys.php
Length: 4.18