Howler of the Week

The Sydney Morning Herald (gee, Fairfax quality control is out the door lately) has this utter gem in a story about a Green's proposal to add Kids Helpline to Telstra's USO obligations:

"The amendment would include the number for Kids Helpline, the only national 24-hour phone counselling service for young people in distress.

"People should know that a fully privatised Telstra will shed this sponsorship in the future. It needs to be legislated upfront so that shareholders know that this is an ongoing community responsibility that Telstra will have," Senator Brown said."

Premise wrong, facts wrong, nobody checks anything do they?

(The link won't work because of the SMH's attitude to subscriptions. Try Google News with Greens Helpline and Telstra.)

Redefining "Most"

Just a snippet. I have put a fuller version of this on CommsWorld but I find it amusing that Telstra's plan to put in 500,000 ADSL2+ ports has been re-interpreted by the Sydney Morning Herald, here as being ADSL2+ to most households.
Half a million out of eight million isn't "most" of anything. It's just a piece of thoughtless, throwaway hype designed to lend excitement to what was an otherwise mundane reiteration of yet-another story about what a CEO said in a speech.