Mea culpa

I am embarassed to admit that yes, I did indeed quote circulation figures to refute Polly's claim about readers.  Mea culpa. I was wrong.

Readership figures for most major newspapers can be found here.  I do not have time right now to re-do the calculations, bu suggestions in the comments of previous posts suggest that the 40% figure is still wrong, but not as wrong as I claimed.  (I would note that the NMA site does not include figures for the FT, the Scotsman or Herald, though of course this is unlikely to affect the outcome significantly.)

Thank you to those who pointed out the error, and thanks to everyone who thinks that factual accuracy is necessary for credibility.

UPDATE

Once again, thank you to everyone who pointed out that when I took Polly to task for saying that Murdoch owned more than 40% of the press readership in this country, I used circulation rather than readership. 

The readership data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency's website seem to look like this for daily papers:

Daily Mail	5,260,000	20%
Standard	794,000	3%
Daily Express	1,760,000	7%
Daily Star	1,498,000	6%
Guardian	1,171,000	4%
Independent	769,000	3%
Daily Mirror	3,652,000	14%
The Times	1,781,000	7%
The Sun	7,806,000	29%
The Telegraph	2,002,000	8%
Total	26,493,000	100%

 

And like this for the Sundays:

 

Mail on Sunday	6,161,000	20
Sunday Express	1,980,000	6
Daily Star Sunday	913,000	3
The Observer	1,471,000	5
Independent on Sunday	762,000	2
Sunday Mirror	4,123,000	13
The People	1,874,000	6
The Sunday Times	3,532,000	11
News of the World	8,242,000	27
Sunday Telegraph	1,867,000	6
Total	30,925,000	100

 

In summary, therefore, News International accounts for 36.2% of the readership of the dailies and 38.1% for the Sundays, or 36.46% on a weighted average basis.  Polly claimed it was over 40%, I claimed it was 32%.  It is interesting that the truth lies almost exactly in the middle.  (Though these figures do exclude the FT, the Scotsman or Herald, and the multitude of local papers -- which would tend to lower the actual figure.)

I am, of course, embarassed to have made the mistake.  As a result, I remain convinced that citing sources is helpful when writers quote figures -- apart from anything it helps the reader to check what they are reading.