No doubt about it. It is factual. His report continued in this fashion until most of his audience collapsed, the victims of a subliminally transmitted lobotomy.

Bill Clinton was using his Australian trip as a breather after an exhausting election campaign, and the media appeared to be doing the same. A few got caught napping when President Clinton sneaked some real juice into a seemingly innocuous postcard from Australia kind of speech.

Whilst in Port Douglas, President Clinton said: "I call upon the community of nations to agree to legally binding commitments to fight climate change." This was more than a general purpose statement on global warming. It related to Australia's stance during a UN climate conference in Geneva last July. At the time, Australia found itself compromising its high-profile on the environment for the sake of protecting the coal industry. So soon after a long campaign against French nuclear testing, Australia and New-Zealand stood alone and were widely criticised by a united world. The two countries were the only OECD nations to vote against legally binding targets on greenhouse emissions. In other words, Australia is not the environment champion it claims to be but actively seeks to obstruct world-wide measures to fight pollution.

Reporting the Bill Clinton's speech, Nine News rightly established the connection between Clinton's statement and the events which unfolded during the Geneva conference. This is amusing because at the time, only the ABC and SBS gave any coverage to the conference. I assumed back then that the commercial stations were muzzled by interests related to the mining industry.

Seven completely missed the boat and passed Clinton's sting off as a call for a join Australian-American strategy to combat global warming. This deceitful angle to the speech portrayed Australia and America as working hand in hand towards the same goal, when in reality, there are on a collision course. Seven avoided the above quote and chose instead a less pointed part of Clinton's speech: "A greenhouse may be a good place to raise plants but it is no place to nurture our children" Clearly, Seven removed all context potentially pitting Australia and America against each other. The mentors had written the script and no fact was to get in the way.

Fact: Nine spent 30 seconds on the reporting and analysis of Bill Clinton's speech on global warming, the ABC used 2 minutes and 10 seconds and Seven a total of 20 seconds.

• On Tuesday, Nine aired a piece on a high-rise fire in Hong Kong. At one point in the story, graphic footage of a man falling from the burning building was shown. Adrian Brown, who filed the report, implied the man had died. To show a man falling to his death without a prior warning to the audience is unacceptable. To roll the segment in slow-motion is voyeuristic, and to routinely add scream sound-effect to such footage is tabloid journalism. Incidentally, the man did not die and Nine corrected the next day.

• On Thursday, the ABC reported the intended seizure and distribution of Martin Bryant's assets to his victims. This was hardly a scoop, the same news had been broadcast on Seven a week earlier.

• On Sunday, some big tennis news on Nine with a report on the ball-boys practising for the 13/1/97 Australian Open. I wonder which other sports got ditched for this rubbish.
• Still on Sunday Nine's "in-brief" item on the Ericsson Cup soccer did break a new record. It was timed at a grand total of 2.78 seconds. That's right, two seconds and seventy eight hundredths. Don't blink or you'll miss it.

• Last year, the lead-up to the Australian Open golf was all Greg Norman. This year, he was dumped by the media to allow for the build-up of another draw-card. The shark was summarily replaced by the tiger. A tragic choice really if one considers the expectations on Tiger Woods were misplaced. He flopped miserably while the shark stormed into the lead early and never looked back.

• OJ is back. With the curtain falling on the Bryant trial, you can expect the OJ Simpson civil trial to make a sizeable come-back. Where would we be without our daily dose of intrigue and scandal?