A couple of PESOs ago I took a shot of the Victoria Cross Metro station. Today I had to go into the office again to move desks. I had intended to go and shoot a couple of the new stations' murals at lunch time. Instead I had to leave early so I was limited to Victoria Cross or Central. Why?

Because I (and some of my colleagues) made the mistake of taking mainstream media news reports seriously. We should know better by now.

There had been industrial action on the railways for the previous few weeks. It had caused significant disruptions, including on the Monday. However on Sunday 8 December the NSW Government obtained a Federal Court injunction against further action pending an appeal by the unions involved. By Monday evening not one, not two, but several news outlets were cheerfully confirming that while the disputes were not settled, everything would be mostly back to normal the following day. The source of this information was never made clear.

I arrived at the station at the usual time. The usual southbound train (which arrives before my northbound one) did not arrive and I went to check the booking office. A hand written sign said "For the next three days, trains will generally run to a weekend (hourly service) timetable". My train arrived on time but instead of being an express it was all stations for the first half of the trip, terminating at Central rather than continuing into the city.

A friend / colleague comes from the Central Coast line and had seen the same news reports the previous night. She arrived at her station at 05:00. She arrived in the office around 08:00. So no, not really "back to normal".

The standard of reporting on this issue has been dismal all the way through. A few weeks earlier (on 21 November) we were facing the prospect of a 3 day rail strike running from Friday morning to Sunday night. Thus two of the days would have been weekends, and the other a working day where a huge number of people work from home. In news reports it was declared to be, were it to go ahead, "the largest rail shutdown in living memory".

I cannot find a direct quote that was the original source of that nonsense. It appeared on the Australian Associated Press wire service as an unattributed statement ("The largest rail shutdown in living memory would have caused commuter chaos"), and it looks like several other media outlets ran with it. SBS, for example, just parroted it. The closest I can find to a source is where the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on 19 November: "Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland said that if the shutdown proceeded, it would be the worst for Sydney's rail network in living memory", but they didn't directly quote him. Thus I don't know whether it is a quote, or paraphrased.

Here's the problem. On 11 June 1979, while a lot of people who are alive today were still living (though whether they still have their memories is another issue, I concede), an 11 day train strike ended. 11 Days. Those were mostly working days so it was a period during which over 4,200 workers were stood down, and tens of thousands were at risk of being stood down. After all, there was no remote working and no online shopping in 1979.

I don't care that the reporters who parroted the Worst! In! Living! Memory! hyperbole didn't remember the June 1979 train strike, since those under the age of 40 weren't even born then. I don't even care that they don't remember all the other train strikes that occurred in the late 70s of which the June 1979 one was just the worst. I do care that despite Tik-Tok assuring us that history started no further back than what was posted 30 minutes earlier, the reporters who are covering this are wholly ignorant of the industrial landscape... well, pretty much since Federation, because one thing led to another thing led to another thing ALLLL the way down to the present day. The industrial relations turmoil of the 60's and 70s led to the price and wages accord under the Hawke government which led to major changes to the industrial relations model which went hand in hand with deindustrialisation and offshoring which led to diminished union powers which led to the Qantas baggage handling case... everything is interconnected and anyone who is ignorant of the past (the real past, not the Netflix version of it) cannot possibly understand (or reliably report on) the present. Any reporter who was not ignorant of history should have had their bullsh1t detector swinging its needle all the way to the right and smashing through the retaining peg as soon as they heard the "worst shutdown in living memory" line.

Maybe some weren't ignorant, and some did know, but then we come to the "If it bleeds, it leads" problem. Hyperbolic headlines are standard operating procedure now, a desperate attempt to keep eyes on pages or screens. That has always been a problem of course, but now the only people who can take them seriously are those who have just fallen off the turnip truck.

I have no idea whether the claim that services would be "back to normal" on Tuesday was down to the reporters being lied to, or being too lazy to check and verify. What I do know is that I - and others - are mightily annoyed that we fell for it.

I can't imagine why the concept of "If you haven't verified it yourself from primary sources, don't believe it" has become a thing, or why news audiences are falling faster than an aeroplane with no wings. (The latter point has led to one of our local news services introducing horoscopes as part of their nightly "news" broadcasts. I wish I was kidding about that. I don't... I just don't know who the frack they think their core audience is. But that's the state of "news" these days.)

So that's how I ended up shooting the metro platform of a station that I hadn't intended shooting. The metro lines were dug way, way down into the earth, so there are some pretty impressive escalator trips involved.