Again, ownership is not the same as sales

Once again Media Watch fails to adhere to the ABC Charter

Somewhat hilariously Barry picked up (briefly) on Rudd's erroneous claim that Murdoch owns 70% of newspapers

It's 63%, he corrected, and helpfully added 'of sales' at the end of his statement - which means he is technically correct

But he did not pull up Rudd for ignoring that key point of difference between sales, and ownership of newspapers

He also didn't amend last week's entry which made the exact same mistake

But maybe he is listening to me (or more likely Andrew Bolt)

It was also sad to see that once again the show focused on the Telegraph and other Murdoch press, with essentially nothing on Fairfax - obvious headlines were shown, including the same one from last week (why?) and an analysis was done of how many supported Labour or Coalition

Note that no similar analysis was done for any other paper, despite Fairfax papers being clearly of a similar bent towards Labor (an analysis proving me wrong would be an even stronger point)

Likewise, out came the 1992 famous Sun Kinnock lightbulb front page - if you know some British political history you'll know that John Major won an unexpected victory and only the Sun called it, leading them to crow that they was 'wot won it'

They claim that, but many commentators take the view that they just pick winners (as they have picked every winner for decades) which is good for their commercial interests - both Kinnock and Brown were extremely unpopular, both were hated by the Sun, both lost - correlation or causation??

I personally hated them too, but I didn't read the Sun

But anyway, my point is it's a tad tenuous to bring out a 20 year old infamous front page from the UK

The stream of attacks on the Murdoch press is quite tiring, almost every episode of Media Watch under Barry has focused on right-wing media, or even praised the left-wing media

I repeat last week's point that this is a clear departure from the editorials of the more reasonable Holmes, and a contradiction of Barry's defence against Andrew Bolt's claim that he was another leftie host