The ABC claimed that The Australian's columnist Janet Albrechtsen misrepresented the nature and source of 'Good News from Iraq', a regular feature of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com web site.
ABC television's Media Watch program presenter Liz Jackson referred to Albrechtsen's 4 May 2005 column in The Australian, where she erroneously named www.wsj.com as the URL for the feature rather than www.OpinionJournal.com . Both are websites of The Wall Street Journal.
On the 9 May broadcast, Jackson mocked the Albrechtsen report. "Good News from Iraq is not published on the highly respected Wall Street Journal website ..." referring to OpinionJournal.com as a "sister site", a "spin-off site" or a "Dow Jones website". Jackson did not make it clear that OpinionJournal.com is a Wall Street Journal website. At best, the relationship between wsj.com and OpinionJournal.com was left muddied by the 9 May broadcast.
In a subsequent "correction" on 16 May 2005 Media Watch admitted that The Wall Street Journal in fact does pay for and edit the good news round-up and that it was wrong on these points. Hiowever Jackson reiterated: "As we pointed out the Good News isn't published on the Wall Street Journal's primary web site, but on a sister site, OpinionJournal.com." (...my emphasis - note the continued use of the term "sister site" as a form of denigration. Sandgroper.)
The ABC made no attempt to point out that wsj.com and OpinionJournal are both websites of The Wall Street Journal and that "Good News from Iraq" in fact is published by the Wall Street Journal. On the contray, Media Watch would not back away from the Albrechtsen attack, saying: "We stand by our story. Janet Albrechtsen's column gave ...(the OpinionJournal website) ...a journalistic credibility it doesn't deserve...."
The documentation is set out on www.abc.net.au/mediawatch
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