Mind you, it's easy to make slips during rolling coverage of big events - and we've seen plenty of that over the break.

Let me say that I think, on the whole, the media did a fine job of covering the Queensland and Victorian floods, and cyclone Yasi.

Vast resources were outlaid. Hundreds of hours of TV and radio coverage, thousands of pictures, and hundreds of thousands of words. A lot of it was excellent. In contrast to the Victorian bushfires two years ago, we've received very few complaints this time about media intrusion or insensitivity.

But there were still some lessons to be learned - and it's Media Watch's ungrateful task to review them.

Lesson one: if a number seems really and truly amazing, that's probably because it's wrong.

On January the 6th, for example, the city of Rockhampton was...

TOUGHING IT OUT — The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, 6th January, 2011

According to the Morning Bulletin there'd been...

30,000 pigs swept away in flood. — The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, 6th January, 2011

Thirty thousand pigs? Really? Yup.

More than 30,000 pigs have been floating down the Dawson River since last weekend... — The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, 6th January, 2011

But the next morning the Bully printed a...

Correction What Baralaba piggery-owner Sid Everingham actually said was "30 sows and pigs", not "30,000 pigs" — The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, 7th January, 2011

Read the full article and correction published in The Morning Bulletin

Didn't anyone at the Bully go "30,000 pigs? Really?" before it went to press? Apparently not.