Ever since Sharri Markson took over The Australian‘s media section, it’s shown an obsession with Media Watch. So much so that a week hasn’t gone by without some piece criticising the show and host Paul Barry.
Today’s edition of the newspaper continues the trend, with a piece by Markson quoting several News Corp editors saying Barry wasn’t fit to host the program. According to editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell:
“While the Oz had some disputes with [former host] Jonathon Holmes, mainly over his climate change obsessions, he was at least a fair journalist, and presented the program with humour and good grace. Paul Barry’s work is not fair.”
According to Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker:
“Barry, like his predecessor, appears to have an obsession with The Daily Telegraph… No perceived error in The Tele was too trivial for Media Watch while similar or worse examples in other publications, particularly Fairfax, were regularly ignored. Barry arrives at The Daily Telegraph’s coverage with a proven record of irrational hostility towards the paper and its parent company.”
And according to Queensland’s Sunday Mail editor Peter Gleeson:
“It does seem a bit odd that the person who wrote a boom that essentially assassinates the character of News Corp is hosting a program that often looks at media bias.” [Last year saw the release of Barry’s book, Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch Succession, which it appears News Corp believes makes him too conflicted to comment fairly on the company.]
There’s rigour, of a sort, to the Oz‘s latest attack on Barry. The newspaper went through each of the Media Watch episodes since Barry took over to catalogue how many were about News Corp. It even commissioned iSentia to analyse Barry’s Twitter feed for “any perceived bias against News Corp”. (Barry tweeted 54 times in the past month — 30 of his tweets were about News Corp, mostly about the UK hacking trial). And the whole thing is even illustrated by a paparazzi shot of Barry, featuring him in a T-shirt with coffee outside the ABC on Friday …
“I’m very happy to be pictured in a T-shirt,” the Media Watch host told Crikey this morning. “I was very happy to pose for them if that was what they wanted.”
He was, however, less happy about errors in The Oz’s story.
Firstly, the piece says Media Watch “has been forced to make three corrections in just seven 10-minute episodes”. Barry says he’s corrected the record only once. On Twitter, he also disputed the 500,000 figure given in the story as Media Watch’s audience, and the claim that it’s a 10-minute program (he says Media Watch is a 15-minute program).
There’s another weird thing about the story. In the iPad version of the story, Whittaker is quoted as saying Barry was ordered by ACMA to apologise in 2012 when he was filling in for Holmes as Media Watch host. The paper version has something different, quoting Whittaker saying it was Holmes who fought against having to apologise for not seeking comment from The Daily Telegraph (as the Oz’s own report on the matter reveals, that’s what happened). Barry, who must have read the iPad version, told us the Oz had got it wrong. We thought so too until checking the paper version when Markson disputed this on Twitter. We’re not sure why the two quotes don’t match up.
Barry told Crikey errors in stories are perhaps one reason News Corp’s papers get on Media Watch so often. “We’re obsessed with upholding high standards in the media,” he said. “If The Australian and Daily Telegraph want to stay off Media Watch, they should clean up their act.”
This morning, Barry and Markson were back at it on Twitter. This war is just getting started.
What a bunch of hypocritical cry-babies. They’re happy to breach basic editorial standards on editorialising and making electoral endorsements; and they’re happy to floating professional ethics and disempower and subvert self-regulation; and they’re happy to bully and victimised perceived enemies real and imagined to create and reinforce a taboo on discussing their mendaciousness; and they regularly launch their own obsessive, repetitive campaigns. But don’t you dare mention it!
From the mountain of evidence, I reckon it seems to be a prerequisite that for a job with Murdoch, running any his Conservative PR publications, you have to be afflicted with spectrophobia – as well as a penchant for promoting partisan politics and entertainment over news?
Murdoch Trolls running “70”% of our viewspapers/hate media – with their partisan edited agenda – why wouldn’t they attract a similar proportion of attention?
[With Blot’s penchant – given his ubiquitous access to Limited News resources to sell what he does – anyone catch the rancid anti-Left, branding, rant of Des Houghton on Saturday?]
It’s amazing how the mentality of all News publications are so similar. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a broadsheet like The Australian or a gutter rag like The Telegraph the same sense of grevience pervades them all.
In the UK, The Sun and it’s now defunct sister publication The News of the World also considered themselves to be constantly under attack from forces elsewhere in the media and government. The revelations in the current Hacking Trial paint a picture of a bunker mentality amongst its workforce.
In the US, The New York Post and in particular Fox News, the paranoia virtually drips from every report they make.
Different countries and different styles of media but all of them reactionary, angry and paranoid.
It can only come from the top and one has to wonder what fevered nightmares trouble the sleep of Rupert Murdoch. I wonder if he dreams of wolves biting his feet like Stalin?
Apparently a glass jaw is now the number 1 requirement for working at News Corp. A bunch of bullies who hate having their flaws pointed out.