Here’s a riddle to ponder over lunch at Thursday’s PANPA Future Forum plenary: Is News Limited a mere weakling in the dominance stakes, capturing a trifling quarter of the eyeball attention of Australians, or does it have the 70 per cent of newspaper readership it admits its “aggressive sales teams” have claimed, writes Peter Coleman.

Heather White – the former News Limited group research director now described by flagship national daily ‘The Australian’ as the company’s ‘insights head’ – would have you believe the former.

In a piece bylined by media editor Stephen Brook, the “statistical half-truth” that News Limited “controls 70 per cent of Australia's newspaper readership market” is put down as an untruth. What it refers to, the article claims, is the share of the paid newspaper circulation of the five-capital-city market of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, plus the national market including ‘The Australian’ and the ‘Australian Financial Review’… “a share of sales, not eyeballs”.

Brook, incidentally, has just moved to the Oz from a deputy’s role at Britain’s  mediaguardian.co.uk, a position which would equip him well to tell a story or two about News’ UK activities.

But we digress.

Back to Heather White, whose name curiously appears alongside a quote (attributed only by implication) that “hardly anyone only reads a News Limited newspaper”.

That figure, it says, “is just 26 per cent of the population. But of that, 96 per cent obtain news from commercial radio and television…”

So one moment we’re talking about the newspaper market, and the next, we’re rolling TV and radio into the equation. And then – curiously again – there’s a change of heart with, ‘The 70 per cent figure was not entirely incorrect but what it was referring to had become distorted, Ms White said. "There's a factual basis to it . . . but it is not the whole story. There are many ways to present audience figures."

Aha, audience.

Still quoting, ‘Her analysis of Roy Morgan data showed that News Limited had: 48 per cent of print revenue, 60 per cent of newspapers sold in Australia, 32 per cent (owned fully or partly) of newspaper titles (printed at least weekly) and 61 per cent of the population aged 14 or older read a News Limited paper each week.’

And there are more figures, this time from Nick Keenan, non-broadcast head at media planning and buying agency MediaCom, who puts News at 56 per cent of revenue, Fairfax ‘and associates’ about 27 per cent, West Australian Newspapers nearly ten per cent and APN News and Media three per cent.

There are famously said to be ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’, a phrase attributed by Mark Twain and others to former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. And statistics can be all about asking the right question in order to get the answer you want, or qualifying the statement.

So if the discussion is about influence, perhaps we should forget revenue, and extend ‘readership’ to also include freesheets. I don’t have the figures, but it’s like they would be different to either.

The fact is that in print terms, Brisbane and Adelaide are effectively one-voice towns: While Fairfax has a national business daily and some suburban titles, and there are minority independent players, there’s little alternative to a News national, metropolitan or suburban paper in those cities.

In regional centres such as Cairns and the Gold Coast, the picture is similar, and News deals firmly with challenges to what it regards to its patch: Consider, for example, the response to Fairfax’s attempts to take its ‘Newcastle Herald’ into the NSW Central Coast territory of News’ ‘Express Advocate’ freebie.

Recent years have also seen News appear as an aggressive competitor on the Queensland Sunshine Coast, where it acquired Lindsay Bok’s ‘Noosa Journal’ and Michael Hannan’s ‘Weekender’, and has launched two more titles. Watch out APN.

Newspaper readers would benefit from more variety, but they’re unlikely to get it, given the ‘sunset industry’ Kerry Stokes says we’re all in, and cosy-looking carve-up of regional territory which appears to keep Fairfax and APN off each others’ toes.

Not that I’m advocating a public inquiry into media, Green-sponsored or otherwise. Just that no cause is well served by hypocrisy and misinformation.

• It was interesting to see Rupert Murdoch weigh into the debate (or speculation) about sharing of print facilities. He was variously quoted (at this month’s investor briefing) saying that there were “no plans to rationalise printing operations” within News in Australia, and that they didn’t have spare capacity.

That’s not what you would have read in recent months, as Murdoch papers speculated about the possibility of Fairfax metros being printed on the (relatively new) presses of  News Limited in Sydney.

I use the phrase ‘relatively new’ advisedly, but with caution: It appears in reports of Rupert Murdoch’s comments, as in, "in Australia, we have relatively [new], well, five-year-old, plants in each of the big cities”.

The fact is that in the two cities I mentioned earlier, Brisbane and Adelaide, the plant producing News’ metropolitan titles is a lot more than five years old (think nearer 20) even though a Murdoch minion may have written a cheque for an upgrade more recently. It’s depressing, in fact, to consider that production quality from these plants – while improved – is probably as good as it will get, barring a breakthrough from a consumables supplier.

A contrast, in fact, to that in Chullora, or regional centres such as the Gold Coast or Hobart (where incidentally, the locals are convinced that the ‘relatively new’ plant is to be closed). And of course, the UK with its huge triple-width presses in London and Liverpool… as Murdoch says, “probably the most efficient … in Europe”.

But as Heather White will know, if you say a thing enough times, it has a way of gaining credibility of its own.