Media Watch (TV program)
Australian television program
Media Watch, formerly Media Watch: The Last Word, is an Australian television programme created and broadcast by ABC Television. It is dedicated to the analysis and critique of Australian media, including its corporate and political interconnections. A number of journalists have presented the program since it premiered in 1989. As of March 2025 the program's host is Linton Besser.
History
The show, initially called Media Watch: The Last Word, first aired in 1989, with Stuart Littlemore as the inaugural host.
In 1992 the subtitle was dropped and the show became simply Media Watch.
Format
Media Watch is a 15-minute program which identifies, investigates and examines instances of what the program determines to be failings in news coverage by Australian media outlets. The series features a single host speaking directly to camera, detailing a mix of amusing or embarrassing editing gaffes (such as miscaptioned photographs or spelling errors) as well as more serious criticism including media bias and breaches of journalistic ethics and standards. Over the years, the program's emphasis has shifted towards the latter.
Although most episodes of Media Watch focus on any recent incidents of media misconduct, episodes sometimes focus on a single issue of particular importance (for instance, news coverage of a recent election).
“Media Watch (TV program)” enters the record as australian television program. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Media, Watch and program can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6805564. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2025 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Media Watch (TV program)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.