ABC corrects $50m mistake

MEDIA Watch moved yesterday to correct its inaccurate reporting of The Australian’s financial position.

MEDIA Watch moved yesterday to correct its inaccurate reporting of The Australian’s financial position, just hours after the newspaper lodged a complaint with the communications watchdog about the ABC program’s coverage.

After nine days of stonewalling, Media Watch host Paul Barry finally admitted he had put to air false information, writing on the program’s website that “Media Watch accepts that the insider’s figure of $40 million to $50 million was too high”.

But the correction was dismissed as “weasel words” by The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, who said there was an “ethical blind spot in the program’s undergraduate approach to its latest mistake this week”.

“Paul Barry shows an edited clip of Sharri Markson’s interview with me,” Mr Mitchell said.

“The full interview on The Australian website shows my quote was specifically rejecting the $50m figure.

“This quote was edited in a deliberately dishonest way to make it look like I was admitting something I was specifically denying.

“(ABC managing director) Mark Scott should act like the editor-in-chief he is paid to be and make Paul Barry pull down his doctored video.

“Mark Scott should then direct him to apologise like a man, rather than snivel around behind the weasel words he has put up as a correction today.”

Mr Mitchell, the nation’s most experienced newspaper editor, said he should not need to point out to Barry that the claims by Media Watch that his newspaper was losing $50m were 3 1/2 times more than The Australian’s actual loss.

“It broadcast its original figures without checking with anyone inside the company or the paper,” Mr Mitchell said.

“It now accepts that is completely wrong. It needs to apologise for the error of fact and the separate error in journalistic process.”

The Australian Communications and Media Authority will assess if it should launch an investigation into whether Barry, who is paid $191,259 to host Media Watch one night a week, has breached the ABC code of conduct for editorial practice.

The letter to ACMA from The Australian’s lawyers states that, when confronted with an error, “the ABC’s response is self-serving, ridicules the complaint process and aggravates the harm caused by its incorrect statement to suit an improper editorial intention of the Media Watch program”.

The inaccurate reporting on Media Watch was also raised in a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night in Canberra, where Mr Scott was being questioned.

During a 10-minute probe from senator Anne Ruston over the false claims, Mr Scott said there would be a dramatic change in the way the national broadcaster would communicate corrections and apologies for its reporting errors to its audience.

But, yesterday, the managing director refused to provide more detail on the corrections policy, such as when it would start or whether more funding had been sought for its implementation, revealing only that the ABC’s head of editorial policy, Alan Sunderland, would oversee the new system.