Lehmo’s shock at radio sacking. The sacked co-host of Melbourne’s top-rating FM radio breakfast show Anthony ‘Lehmo’ Lehmann has told the Sunday Herald Sun of his shock at getting the boot. He and Jo Stanley were told their Gold FM show wouldn’t be back on air this year at the same time they learned they’d won the November ratings:

We were number one and then we got sacked. We were idiots. We should never have gone to number one. I have spoken to Jo, and said we got ahead of ourselves, it was a mistake to work so hard and get ourselves to number one. If we had our time again we would stay middle of the pack and we possibly would still have a job.

‘I’m not dead!!!!!!’. British media including the BBC have had to apologise and correct stories after reporting a Big Brother star was dead, when she was actually very much alive. A tweet on Rebekah Shelton’s account said she had died, which was widely reported before she posted again, implying that her account had been hacked.

The poetry of translating Trump’s ‘shithole’ comment. US President Donald Trump’s reported comment countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and several across Africa are “shitholes” —  “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he reportedly asked during negotiating immigration laws with US lawmakers — is entirely on brand for him. Apart from reiterating every image of him as a boorish, ill-informed, incurious bigot, it reiterated how his approach to language (rambling incoherence interrupted with the odd burst of profanity) presents challenges to the media, both in the US and internationally. Just as “grab ’em by the pussy” required publications to decide what was acceptable to print, a slang term like shithole presented international outlets with the need to translate the term.

As the Wall Street Journal noted: 

Mr. Trump’s remark posed some translation problems as it spread around the world. Japanese daily Sankei euphemized, ‘countries that are dirty like toilets.’ French newspaper Le Monde wrote, ‘shit countries,’ while the BBC Persian Service wrote ‘countries that are toilet holes.’

Mashable has put together a handy list of all the translations they could find for the phrase which range from fairly direct to “I can see what you’re going for there” to  to oddly poetic. Haiti went for “hole of shit” while Finland had “asshole countries”. El Slavador ran with “fuck holes” while Taiwan translated to “countries where birds don’t lay eggs” and South Korea said “beggars’ haunts”. — Charlie Lewis

The Ghan by the numbers. SBS’s second go at slow TV over the weekend peaked with an audience of 69,000 metro viewers. The network ran 17 hours of The Ghan following a successful three-hour edit last weekend. According to MediaWeek, the program started at 3am with 7000 metro viewers, and across the day measured 4000, 25,000, 63,000 and 52,000 for the five legs of the journey. 

Last week’s ‘short’ version of the program won it a metro audience of 436,000, 406,000 and 396,000 for progressive hours.

The format is based on a Norwegian series that debuted in 2009 with a seven-hour unedited train journey and a nine-hour knitting marathon played out in real time. Finnish and British broadcasters have had a go at the concept, there are ‘slow TV’ offerings on Netflix, and now SBS has had a crack in the local market.