No sitting on the fence over paywalls

Now to an occasional Monkey feature: lies, damned lies and statistics corner. This just in, from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Readers reluctant to pay for online news ... Rupert Murdoch's aim to have readers pay for access to newspapers online has been called into question by a global survey that found readers are unlikely to pay for general news they can get elsewhere free." So that couldn't be clearer, right? Hold on, Nelly. Not a bit of it. Here's Murdoch's newspaper The Australian: "Readers not averse to paying for online content ... A global survey has found that readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas." Naturally, both papers were referring to the same "global survey", by PricewaterhouseCoopers.