Press Council and Media Watch

The Chairman of the Press Council reports further on the Council's dealings with ABC-TV's Media Watch.

In the May issue, I outlined the first letters in an exchange of views between me and David Salter, the Executive Producer of Media Watch, in the columns of The Sydney Morning Herald. On 2 May, The Herald printed this further letter from Mr Salter:

"On the basis of the precise figures supplied by Professor Flint of the Press Council (Letters, April 26), we are happy to stand corrected.

"He confirms that of 345 complaints to the council in 1991, only 22 were upheld. That is not, as we stated, a ratio of one in five, but more like one in 15. (In fact, fewer than one in six complaints even survived to the adjudication process.)

"We apologise unreservedly for overstating, by a factor of three, the public's chance of having a complaint against the press upheld. Professor Flint now has a gunshot wound to the foot to match his blind eye."

I responded, in a letter published on 9 May:

"So Media Watch is never wrong. Mr Salter (Letters, May 2) is as entertaining as his program. If we apply his new performance criteria to the legal system (say, to your average television QC), we'd judge him by the ratio between the number of cases won in court to those threatened: one in a thousand, one in ten thousand...? Who knows? He obviously implies that if you don't win in court, you are not satisfied.

"So much for alternative dispute resolution."

The exchange ended at that point.

However, on 10 May, remarks I had made to a journalist in an interview, about Media Watch were widely quoted. I described the program as "trivial and irrelevant", noting that "it concentrates on a lot of grammar and semantics and whether a country paper might have picked up a story published in a city newspaper."

Additionally, a report of the ABC's Independent Complaints Review Panel recently noted faults in the program's fact-checking mechanism in upholding a complaint against it from The Mercury, Hobart.

David Flint

see also
Index on David Flint's material on the website

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