Just my opinion. Rumour has it Kenny himself was charged with writing today’s editorial in The Australian: a defence of the journalist’s dealings with asylum seeker known as “Abyan”, the Nauru detainee transferred to Australia for an abortion following an alleged rape but who was returned to the island before the procedure was carried out.

The editorial is scathing of how Paul Barry and Media Watch chose to dissect Kenny’s work on Nauru:

“The program could have opined on Kenny’s revelations about refugee children boycotting school, some refugees intimidating others over trumpeting their success stories, asbestos problems in Nauruan buildings or, indeed, how Kenny relayed the personal wishes of the alleged rape victim and pregnant refugee known as Abyan. ABC viewers might have been interested in Kenny’s impressions of the refugee processing camps, the wellbeing of children or the attempts to integrate refugees into the Nauruan community. But none of this took up any of Media Watch’s time.”

Editor Chris Mitchell did not deny the editorial was written by Kenny, but he took responsibility for its content himself. “All editorials are totally directed from go to whoa [by] me. No one gets to write their own opinion. Just my opinion,” Mitchell said via email.

If Kenny did write the editorial, and is thus referring to himself in the third person, then he thinks pretty fondly of himself. He calls his visit to Nauru a “breakthrough”, his conversations with Abyan “crucial and compelling” and his reportage “telling”.

Yes, if you want to find out just how good a journalist Chris Kenny is, then maybe all you need to do is ask Chris Kenny. — Crikey intern Mark Kearney

Makin’ bacon. The World Health Organization’s report on the cancer risk of red meat was a well-researched piece bringing together many studies at the cutting-edge of public health. The stories about it were, by and large a a huge beat-up, portraying meat as as dangerous as smoking. It isn’t, and the WHO didn’t say it was.

What the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found was that “each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%”. That is, processed meat now shares the same carcinogenic classification as smoking in that it is something that definitely causes cancer. But that isn’t to say that eating processed meat is as likely to kill you as smoking, which causes around 1 million cancer-related deaths worldwide every year (estimates suggest colorectal cancer caused by a diet high in processed meats kills around 34,000 people each year). The IARC also classified the consumption of (unprocessed) red meat into Group 2A: “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

What sort of mealy-mouthed, nanny-state, panic merchant clowns are doing that? Step forward and be shamed …

At least The Oz (left), news.com.au (top right) and The Guardian (bottom right) hammed up the science. Ah, well, anything to beef up the page views. — Dan Wood

Streaming surprise? Earlier this year the NFL raised eyebrows by selling off the streaming rights to a game in London between the underdog Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Under the deal, the game would be broadcast on TV (cable or free to air) into those regional US markets, and Yahoo won the auction for the streaming rights into the US and the world for around $US20 million. That game was played on Saturday night in London (early US Sunday morning — around 9 am on the East Coast). The NFL and Yahoo reported this week the game attracted 15.2 million unique visitors and a total of 33.6 million streams from all devices around the world (that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole game was streamed. A stream is three seconds or more of continuous downloading).

In all, Yahoo says 460 million total minutes were streamed. The NFL told CNN the number of average concurrent streams (at the same time) was 2.36 million. Around 33%, or five million streams were from international viewers. So how does that compare to existing NFL games? Well, Monday Night Football on ESPN is watched by around 13.5 million viewers and Thursday Night football on CBS is averaging around 17.6 million and Sunday Night Football on NBC is averaging more than 20 million viewers on some nights. That average is the number of people who watched those games all the way through. On that basis the average streams of 2.36 million per minute for the weekend game on Yahoo is well behind (but above the 1.3 million average streams for this year’s Super Bowl, but that game was broadcast to all the US and major global markets live). So an interesting experiment, but not a killer example of streaming video threatening linear TV’s grip on the NFL and other live sport. — Glenn Dyer

Video of the day. The Chinese Community Party has a new five-year plan, and it has released this delightfully weird infomercial about it, featuring Ziggy Stardust … for some reason.