The Herald Sun and Sunrise aren’t letting the facts get in the way. Fairfax announces cadetships for the first time in a while. Murdoch’s hopes of total ownership of Sky Plc have been dashed, and other media tidbits of the day.

Are councils really banning books? The Herald Sun leaned in yesterday to a tabloid favourite — councils were reportedly going to ban books based on “radical” research, and could mean Barbie dolls and Thomas the Tank Engine books would be banned.

The research quoted didn’t actually say books should be banned, and the Municipal Association of Victoria yesterday confirmed that councils are simply reviewing their book and toy stock. But, never letting the facts get in the way, Sunrise picked up the story for two segments, as did some politicians. And the Hun has stuck with the yarn today, running an opinion piece from Dr Kevin Donnelly, the “author of How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia” and 20 online comments and seven letters to the editor on the topic.

To publish or not to publish. Fairfax got itself into a tangle on Saturday, briefly publishing a piece by writer Na’ama Carlin about Nakba Day, which it had accepted to run with a piece of analysis by academic Lana Tatour, then spiked. They were due to run on Saturday, May 12, but were pulled on the Thursday night. Carlin said she’d been told the piece wasn’t “newsy” enough, so was surprised to see it published on Saturday morning. By that stage, it had already been published in Overland, where Carlin took the piece after it was spiked. A Fairfax spokesman told Crikey the piece was published “unintentionally”. “Decisions were made in the normal course of the editing process to hold the piece and run other news content,” he said. “The piece may still get a run at some stage depending on news events.”

New cadets for Fairfax. Fairfax has announced the first round of traineeships at its metro papers since 2014. The 20 positions will be placed at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Australian Financial Review, the Canberra Times, the Brisbane Times and WAToday. The training will run for a year, and trainees will be offered permanent journalist positions when they are finished.

Fairfax’s training (or cadetship) programs have been on-and-off for the past few years — they were cancelled in 2008, re-instated, then cancelled again. In 2014, the company took on 20 trainees. The ABC, News Corp and AAP also run trainee or cadet programs. Fairfax cut 125 editorial positions last year as part of an editorial restructure.

The revolving door. Nine Adelaide’s news director Tony Agars has been shown the door after 15 years in the job. The Advertiser reports that Agars’ contract wasn’t renewed, and he’s to be replaced by his deputy, Jeremy Pudney.

Fox’s Sky hopes dim. The chances of the Murdoch family’s 21st Century Fox getting its hands on all of Sky Plc have receded after the UK government all but cleared the way for a rival, higher offer from Comcast, the big US cable, TV and movie group. UK Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement that he wasn’t persuaded to refer the US$31 billion offer to regulators. Hancock will decide finally by Thursday, but UK media analysts say his announcement clears the way for the Comcast offer to proceed to be converted into a formal offer. Fox has offered £10.75 a share, or £18.5 billion for all of Sky Plc, but it is still stuck in the UK regulatory process. 

The Murdoch’s interests have lobbied and called publicly for the UK government to subject the Comcast offer to equivalent regulatory treatment as the Fox offer, ignoring the very salient point that apart from a non-controlling stake in BuzzFeed, Comcast has no other interests in UK media. News Corp controls four of the most important papers in the UK — The Sun, its Sunday edition, The Times and Sunday Times — as well as controlling Talk Radio and the Storyful digital content group. — Glenn Dyer

Front page of the day.

Glenn Dyer’s TV Ratings. House Rules showed a small flutter of life with its best weeknight performance of the current season — 1.20 million viewers nationally. I wish you could say that about the Talking About Your Generation — the Ten program hosted by Shaun Micallef which turned up on Nine last night and still looking lost and searching for a reason to be on air. It’s return averaged 969,000 viewers over the hour and a quarter. The big question is will they all return next week. The answer is: nope. It is not new and improved from its time on Ten. Have You Been Paying Attention on Ten towelled it (1.07 million).

Seven’s night in regional markets with the News on top with 641,000, the Seven News/Today Tonight on 523,000, House Rules on 461,000, Home and Away was with 427,000 and The 5.30pm part of The Chase Australia with 414,000. Read the rest at the Crikey website.