As this week’s weather headlines prove, one term offers media the biggest bang for their buck: bomb cyclone | Weekly Beast
‘Very, very old’ meteorological term garners 8,500 mentions in a week. Plus: the ABC announces Toxic, a primetime series
The extreme weather in New South Wales this week generated some dramatic headlines. “NSW about to get absolutely obliterated” from news.com.au is a personal favourite – and pretty much summed up the tone of much of the coverage.
One term popped up repeatedly: bomb cyclone. “Urgent warning issued about ‘bomb cyclone’,” the Daily Mail said. We were, according to news.com.au, “in the path of a ‘bomb cyclone”. A bomb and a cyclone in one term is scary stuff, but was it accurate?
The Australian’s night editor, David Tanner, noticed what he called the “explosive terminology”, writing: “In the age of weather dramatisation, nothing goes off quite like a ‘bomb cyclone’.”
The Bureau of Meteorology, also known (confusingly) as BoM, had not referred to the coming storm as a bomb cyclone, so where did it come from?
The first use of the term for this low-pressure system was last Friday afternoon on ABC Radio Newcastle’s Drive program, according to the media monitoring company Streem. The ABC’s NSW weather presenter and meteorologist, Tom Saunders, raised the term during a discussion of his word of the week: bombogenesis. As he explained in an online story: “When a low-pressure system transforms from non-existence to a formidable storm just a day later, meteorologists label it a ‘bomb cyclone’, or a system that has experienced ‘bombogenesis’.
“Bomb cyclone” ahead for Australia’s east coast, the ABC reported on Sunday. And the rest of the media lapped it up. The term garnered significant traction, amounting to 8,547 mentions over the past week across Australian online news, print, radio, TV and podcasts, according to Streem.
The public was a tad sceptical. When the story was posted on the ABC Emergency’s Facebook page, some of the replies included: “A ‘bomb cyclone’? Wow … that’s dramatic …”; “A bomb cyclone hahaha. Now I’ve heard them all”; and “Now a bomb cyclone. OMG I can’t stop laughing.”
Defusing the bomb
Guardian Australia published an explainer on Tuesday noting that the BoM stopped short of using that terminology and mostly referred to this week’s weather pattern as a “vigorous” coastal low.
While “bomb cyclone” is not inaccurate, it caused some confusion across the ABC’s programs as meteorologists asked to explain it politely talked the term down.
“It’s not a term that we choose to use here at the bureau, because it can give people really specific ideas of what they might expect with the weather, which might not actually be what we’re forecasting,” one told Patricia Karvelas.
When Ros Childs asked the same of the senior meteorologist Jonathan How he was a little more blunt: “So the word bomb is a very, very old meteorological terminology, so it’s not something we use here at the bureau any more, but it used to describe the way that these low-pressure systems intensified very quickly.”
An ABC spokesperson said bomb cyclone was an accurate meteorological term deriving from “bombogenesis” which describes the rapid intensification of a low-pressure system.
“The ABC’s meteorologist has given a detailed explanation of the term to audiences as part of his comprehensive reporting on this weather event.”
Sign me up
The Australia Institute’s petition calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Aukus was approaching 10,000 signatories on Thursday when it attracted some big names. Apparently signing up were the ABC journalists Hamish Macdonald, Fran Kelly, Sarah Ferguson and Jeremy Fernandez. Politicians appeared to be climbing onboard too, including Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese. Wait, what? We asked the institute about the unusual signatories and the petition was immediately taken offline.
“Late this afternoon we became aware that a number of fake signatories had been added to our popular Aukus petition, fraudulently using the names, and in some cases publicly available email addresses, of prominent politicians and ABC journalists,” a spokesperson said.
“We briefly unpublished the petition and after an investigation found that one person had created 37 fake signatories, all of which have been deleted. We have taken steps to block the IP address of the person responsible and to prevent this from happening again.”
ABC’s mushroom trial dramatisation
First there were the podcasts and now the primetime drama series is in development. As the jurors were considering a verdict in Erin Patterson’s triple murder trial the ABC announced that Toxic, “a layered and intricate series” exploring the events surrounding that beef wellington lunch, had been commissioned. Its producer, Tony Ayres (The Slap, Glitch, Nowhere Boys), and showrunner, Elise McCredie (Jack Irish, The Clearing, Stateless), are working with the investigative journalist Rachael Brown of the ABC podcast Mushroom Case Daily fame.
Ayres says the story will be told in multiple timelines and from multiple perspectives. “True stories ask storytellers to probe the complexities of human behaviour,” he says. “What really lies beneath the headlines? It’s both a challenge and a responsibility to go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just sensationalise.”
SBS dismisses ME sufferers’ complaints
The SBS ombudsman has written to people who complained about the Insight episode on ME or chronic fatigue syndrome to say an investigation found the program did not breach the broadcaster’s editorial code.
“Having provided a relevant range of viewpoints in the presentation of the topic, the program was broadcast in line with the code,” the letter seen by Weekly Beast said.
“If you consider this response to be inadequate you are entitled to take your concerns to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.”
People living with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome who appeared on the episode had accused the broadcaster of betraying them in the final cut, filing multiple complaints to the ombudsman.
They said the show presented a potentially harmful and unscientific narrative and favoured a person who said she had “cured herself” by “listening to her body”.
One participant who is a carer for his wife and daughter, Peter McCluskey, is disappointed with the outcome and stands by his view that Insight sidelined science, clinical expertise and the lived experience of patients “all under the guise of balance”.
McCluskey said he was considering taking his complaint to the Acma.
Unfinished Project
The Project aired its last episode last Friday after 16 years but its social media pages, run by the production company Roving Enterprises, have continued to entertain.
“The bosses really should have changed the password from Password1,” one Instagram post read. The caption said: “Well, well, well, look who is in charge now … It’s me! The social media hero (that’s what I call myself). So, one question: what should I do with these accounts?”