Bolt and Blair on the 63%

It's doing the rounds...but does anyone care?

Selling ain't owning

Murdoch Haters Owned

When I first came to Australia I was told Andrew Bolt was a crazy shock jock and to avoid him and talkback radio - stick to the ABC for serious commentary they said

Presuming it would be like the BBC, a bit politically correct and alarmist on global warming, but the only serious broadcaster and fairly balanced, I sadly discovered the tv shows were invariably tilted to the left and the radio presenters were even worse - so I shifted to the 'popular' media

I'd say it's fairly clear who gets their sums right on how many papers Murdoch owns

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

Murdoch does not "control two thirds of Australia's newspapers"

Briefly I'd like to rebut the new (or old) host of Media Watch, Paul Barry's claim that Murdoch 'controls two thirds of newspapers' in Australia (Media Watch 5/8/13)

This is a common claim from the left, and it's a convenient little sleight of hand - while it's a true figure if you're talking about audience share it is not the same as 'controlling' the media

For example, if there were 1000 supermarkets, and Coles and Woolies owned 500 each, but Coles had 66% of the shoppers - how many supermarkets would they control?

50% each, clearly

In my hypothetical situation Coles have a bigger market share and therefore influence perhaps, but they are simply winning in an open contest (assuming equitable conditions of course), they don't 'control' the market any more than Woolies

It's the same for newspapers in Australia, News Corp have about two thirds of the circulation, but they only own about 33% of the newspapers - time for some real figures (3 year old data will have to suffice, sorry):

In Sydney there are two main dailies available - The Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) -

Readership:
Tele = 374,000
SMH = 207,000

In Melbourne it's The Herald Sun (News) vs The Age (Fairfax)

Herald = 515,000
Age = 197,000

(I'm discounting The Australian as Australia's only national daily as it has a fairly insignificant circulation, if you credit off the Fairfax national AFR as well then we're only talking 60,000 people nationally)

That's roughly 64% vs 36% in Sydney, and a ridiculous 72% vs 28% in Melbourne but these two papers are available to exactly the same audiences within each city - does Murdoch 'control' two thirds of the two major cities' newspapers? According to the logic of the ABC and many lefties he does, despite having the same number of publications and being on a level playing field as Fairfax, I've never seen a news retailer not selling the SMH along with the Tele

Winning audience share from your rival through the free market is not control, it's providing a product people want in a fair fight with another product - 'control' implies that News Corp own the majority of newspapers, thus limiting access to leftie opinions, but that's simply not true - people choose to buy News products over Fairfax, which is readily available to them (they own 33% of newspapers available and 11 of the top 25 circulating ones, while Fairfax own 10)

Yes, that provides News with the ability to influence two thirds of the audience, but that audience chooses to engage with that publication, the constant claim that News Corp 'controls' the printed press is merely a sook from the losing side

The truth is 'Murdoch' can speak to two thirds of people, and try to influence them, but there is no undue control on his part, clearly two media empires effectively owning every major print publication in the country is control and that should be looked at - but both companies need to be considered and the 'two thirds of newspapers' figure is complete bull designed to attack the 'Hate media' as Labor like to call them (except when they are backing them)

I encourage Paul Barry to correct this statement to at least say that they have 'two thirds of market share', or 'control a third of all newspapers', as they are in no way the same thing - it's a small distinction but an important one, as it implies an unduly gained influence rather than simply achieving more sales in a fair fight, and to be honest I'm pretty sure media people who use that figure know exactly what they're doing by using it

I'd also take this opportunity to express my dissatisfaction with the refreshed Media Watch since Jonathan Holmes left - under him I found it to be one of the few enjoyable ABC shows, occasionally I found a choice or two a little unbalanced, but in the main I found him objective and willing to take on all the media outlets

Conversely Paul Barry spent his first episode praising Julia Gillard and since then has almost exclusively attacked 2GB (and maybe some other right wing talkback stations) and News Corp over fairly small issues

If you watch this week's show, you'll see the criticism of News (with the false claim that riled me) followed by slathered praise for Fairfax's investigation into Labor corruption

Not a huge problem on it's own, aside from the one falsehood you could find this week's particular angle fair, but after weeks of nit-picking over right-wing radio and newspapers it's become somewhat obvious

Ultimately if there's a major story from 'the right', like cash for comment, then obviously it should be used, but in any given week you can easily pick on the Age or the AFR (The Australian have a whole section on it), or the ABC, not to mention Today Tonight or ACA for sheer nonsense or some other questionable issue just as much as you can find the racist guy who the shock jock humours - to delve through talkback radio calls or minor News ltd stories to the almost total exclusion of all others is blatant bias

I would've complained to the ABC but why bother, there's streams of this bias picked up daily and nothing ever gets done, and the website has no activity, so I use my own blog for the sake of posterity

Hopefully market forces will prevail and Paul will lose any viewers Holmes gained..

not that they mind if anyone's actually watching the ABC, but they've lost me

Source

Maths for dummies

It's the census everybody!!! Cue the BBC getting very excited!!!

Very interesting figures - I do love a population pyramid:



Don't you just love the kink in 1946?
















But the really interesting graph is this one:






 That's a huge increase in migrants - over 13% of the population of England and Wales were not born there - and the jump in the last 10 years is obvious

This isn't about race (although white British people are down to 80%), but immigration, these are people who are currently here who were not born here (excluding the Irish), not second or third generation immigrants of a different colour, a figure which is going to rise naturally - these are people who are coming here - effectively it means a hell of a lot of people are being let in at a very fast rate

You can see the figure is pretty static from 1970 to 1990 - rising from about 6% to 7.5% in thirty years, this indicates a fairly steady trickle of immigration, of course if you came here in 1970 you'd probably still be alive in 1990 and you'll still be counted

But In the last twenty years it has effectively doubled, and it's pretty safe to assume that the Labour years are pretty clearly the main factor even in the 90s

Maybe, as the BBC's Home Affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani (isn't that Mark Easton's job?) says it's 'globalisation', which may to some extent be true, but it's also evidence of a lax border control policy or deliberate opening of the floodgates - they've let in what now amounts to 5% of the population in the past ten years, or over quarter of a million people per year

Make of it what you will, it just recalls to mind those 'crazy' stories that Labour deliberately brought in migrants to increase their vote

But anyway, I just found that a pretty remarkable graph - globalisation..maybe, but if that trend continues in ten years we could be looking at every fifth person not being born here - is that a good idea for any (major) country?

My main point was actually supposed to be about this piece by Mark Easton - apparently

there has been a sudden and unexplained rise in the fertility rate over the past few years. Although the increase in the number of women of childbearing age is mainly due to migration over the past decade, they still represent only a small proportion of the total and cannot explain the significant rise in total fertility rate.

Unexplained? Really, I had to dig deeper into this, so I read his previous article from June



Absolutely massive spike after 2001 - coinciding with a massive spike in immigration

Coincidence? Apparently so

Like many people I suspect, my immediate thought was that higher fertility rates might be a consequence of higher immigrations levels. Apparently not.

He's thought the obvious, so is not being politically correct, do go on...

 Immigration has had an impact on the birth rate (the number of babies): foreign mothers now account for a quarter of all births. 

Let's establish this as a fact, it's a fairly well known figure - 25% of all births are to foreign born mothers, and yet didn't I just put up a graph that showed foreign born people are about 13% and only half of that were in the past decade?

 Immigration has not had any significant impact on the fertility rate (babies per mother): the big increase in immigration between 2001 and 2008 was from Eastern Europe, notably Poland, but women from the accession countries do not generally have more babies than British-born mothers. In fact, the fertility rate in Poland is significantly lower than the UK - 1.2 in 2003 and now just under 1.4. 

In Poland? This is where I started to smell the BS - the rate in Poland, not where they are, but where they've left - this is a massive assumption that it's predominantly a cultural issue, as with Asian and African immigrants having larger families

Surely you should be checking the rate of Polish immigrants who are here, surely at least check?? (and I'm completely ignoring that Eastern Europe is about half the immigration figures, the rest are stereotypical 'large family' places like India and Pakistan which isn't mentioned anywhere)

So I did some digging, and found some more obvious trains of thought in the Telegraph, after having skipped 300 results from the Daily Mail...

This again verifies the one in four figure, so we'll keep that stat

New figures show that the number of immigrants having babies has doubled since 2001, largely driven by an influx of Polish, Pakistani and Indian mothers.

Hang on, Polish? But the Polish hate babies more than we do, just look at Poland!!

This has now increased by at least eleven-fold to 23,000 last year, making Poland the top nationality for creating second-generation immigrants to the UK.
Women from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Somalia, Germany, South Africa, Lithuania and China have the next highest number of babies. 

 Even though India provides the highest number of immigrants, the Poles are breeding more? Odd

The proportion of foreign-born women of child-bearing age living in the UK has increased from 14 per cent to 18 per cent since 2007, giving them a substantial impact on the overall number of births.  

So 18% of the fertile are making 25% of the babies

So that means the remaining 82% 'natives' are only making 75% of the babies - what does that tell you about the fertility rate? (that's the maths for dummies)

Birth to UK mothers have also risen, with British-born women have an average of 1.89 children.
However, they are not keeping pace with the births of children to foreign women in the UK, who are giving birth to an average of 2.28 children. 

 So it has indeed risen, but not as much as was being quoted - higher fertility rates in immigrants accounts for about 25% of the increase in fertility

So Mark is technically right, immigration does not entirely account for the increase in births per woman, the group isn't large enough to have that much of an impact but there is clear evidence available that shows foreign-born women are having significantly more babies and that has put some upward pressure on the figure

Why didn't he include this data? It would only make his case stronger - while it accounts for some, it doesn't account for all of it - then you go on and blame Tony Blair for most of it, he's confirmed people's anecdotal evidence and preconceptions and he's found an interesting statistical investigation

Instead the widely-held belief is dismissed and he relies on non-relevant data from another country, which enrages people who either want their views confirmed or who hate flimsy use of figures, forcing them to go and find readily available data and allow them to call him and the BBC biased

If anything I find it lazy, he looks like he's being fed data from a third party who may have an agenda and gone 'this is interesting', the use of Poland's native fertility rate is obviously weak and should at least have been verified as being remotely relevant to the UK's Polish community, instead he just accepts the premise that more Eastern European immigration would in fact lower fertility rates, meaning the British are breeding even more - a simple check of the real figures tells you that's complete nonsense

There's not a figure in sight to back up these claims in the article, barring the use of the actual fertility rates the analysis is cooked up on assumptions and irrelevant facts, which is something you would normally be accusing the 'it's the immigrants!' brigade of doing

What winds me up even more is they are mostly right, Labour welfare policies did pay people to breed - they just seem to have dismissed a portion of the story for the sake of political correctness or being pro-immigration - it could've been interesting, instead, it's not only omitted that a key feature of this trend even exists, but denied it even happened

British Media discovers Prank calls, Hypocrisy

Just a quick note on this daft business of evil Australian DJs (it's late, excuse the poor flow)

We expat Poms have a rather unique insight into this strange case of a bog-standard prank call gone very wrong

You see, we get to know all about Australia's commercial radio stations, and the rank hypocrisy of the British press

The Mail has 'discovered' Kyle Sandilands (who is a controversial DJ who works for the same station) because of course, the two are linked  - dirty Aussies and their crass ways

Not that the left wing Fairfax press here haven't tried to get in digs at Alan Jones, but I digress

The prank was pretty tame, there were no abused children involved, nothing offensive was said, it was a standard Sydney morning radio show wind-up call, but shame on the Ozzies for shaming a nurse into so much anguish that she'd kill herself

But hang on, some Australians may have committed the crime originally but somehow I doubt the nurse would have been too upset by the very concept of being tricked, and was unlikely to be listening to 2day FM or picking up a Sydney daily

No, it was the rampant and vile British press, who are so obsessed with a pair of 30 year olds who managed to have sex that they camped outside her place of work, filled acres of newsprint and got the rather pedestrian prank-call global coverage

This is where my British instincts come in, because you just know the tabloids were having a field day - criticising the hospital, the staff, Australia...wondering if Diana is still alive...

and then of course she was found dead, and it's party time, with lashings of hypocrisy as the same press who flooded the world with such a moronic story turn it into a global epic as they point the finger at a pair of hapless DJs

I'm not sure the two DJs are the ones who have 'blood on their hands', if there is some sort of charge out of the inquest then surely the fault should lay on the ones who applied the pressure so relentlessly and drove a possibly fragile person to such extremes - and they wonder why we got Leveson (I disagree with limits on the press, but it's clear why Leveson happened)

If this had been some politician found with a rent-boy, who was then hounded for a week and found dead, would it be the politician's fault...?