Culture

Twitter Just Killed A Respected Australian Journalist By Mistake

#mungolives.

by Alex McKinnon  8 September 2014

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If you’re not on Twitter — congratulations on making good life choices, by the way — you just missed the latest episode of everyone’s favourite Twitter-based sitcom, “Let’s Say Someone Died Without Any Proof”. This week, it starred veteran Australian political journalist, author and beard-possessor Mungo MacCallum, and was kicked off by fellow journo Anne Summers.

MacCallum, for those of you who aren’t aware, covered federal politics in the Canberra press gallery for years in the ’70s and ’80s and became one of Australia’s most respected journalists and commentators. He still writes for The Drum and The Monthly, as well as other publications, when he’s not engaging in his favourite pastime of being a bearded old yowie with a typewriter living in the hills behind Byron Bay somewhere.

Fellow old m8 and practitioner of the YOLO Mike Carlton quickly followed up on Summers’ lead, tweeting out his sadness at MacCallum’s death and reminiscing about the sick burns he used to put over on old Prime Ministers (his tweets have since been deleted). Unfortunately, neither of these two established journos did much in the way of confirmation before letting this sad news out into the world; it took someone else calling around to confirm that Mungo is not so much “dead” as “sitting in a Melbourne cafe eating some fucking eggs”.

The matter was quickly settled once and for all by by the Echonet Daily, a North Coast-based independent newspaper that tweeted this picture of Mungo with today’s newspaper while looking like a mole creature.

The whole thing was over before any big news outlets could pick up the story and run with it, but not before the hashtag #mungolives became a hilarious thing that exists. Much fun was had at the fact that said Mungo is still alive, and over the fact that “#mungolives” could be taken to mean “mung olives”.

Summers and Carlton have since apologised, which is nice, but the incident serves as a reminder not to believe everything you read on social media, or to retweet things you don’t know to be true. Otherwise certain young writers at certain pop-culture sites might get very upset at the news and go on long Feelings Walks for no reason before being called back into the office by their puzzled editors. Hypothetically.

This is as good a time as any to remember the time Richard Wilkins ended up reporting that Jeff Goldblum fell from a cliff in New Zealand, only for Goldblum to read out his own obituary on the Colbert Report a couple of days later.

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Feature image via EchoNet Daily/Twitter.