West Coast Eagles staffer goes the biff with cameramen, Greggo says Greggo has nothing to apologise for, Sky News embellishes its ratings, and other media tidbits of the day.

AFL staffer pushes waiting media. An AFL team staffer has confronted waiting media at Perth airport filming the arrival of players. A West Coast Eagles steward — named by the Herald Sun as Peter Staples — told media to “piss off” and said the airport was “private property” before pushing one of the camera operators. Cameras had been at the airport (a usual activity for sports media) to get footage of injured player Nic Naitanui returning to Perth.

Coach Adam Simpson told SEN he backed Staples:

It’s one of those ones where you put it into context. We sat at the airport for six hours all up by the time we landed in Perth, it was 12 o’clock at night, we entered and exited in a loading bay area, so not through the public eye. Cameras were there, which, it’s their job. They were asked to leave before the camera started filming, they’d been there for a little bit and then they didn’t. I understand both ends.

Greggo not sorry for MC gig. Suspended Sky News presenter Greg Thomson has said he has nothing to apologise for, after a video was published of him swearing yelling at guests at a charity function he was MCing. In the video, published by 2GB, Thomson was filmed telling guests at a charity function to shut up, while also asking them to raise a glass and “skol a drink with Greggo”. Sky News has suspended Thomson pending an investigation, but he yesterday told Fairfax he didn’t need to apologise:

“It was a difficult, noisy crowd who had no doubt enjoyed a long lunch prior to the event commencing. I’m a fun, popular, off-script MC and received positive feedback and a lot of sympathy from members of the 500-strong crowd who agreed the behaviour of so many others was quite appalling. I certainly have nothing to be sorry about.

RT misled audiences with fake tweets. British regulator Ofcom has found Kremlin-backed TV station RT (previously Russia Today) in breach of standards for faking tweets shown and read out on air. The tweets were used on former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s show, and were presented as being from members of the public, but four of the six presented were from people connected to Salmond or the program. Ofcom found that the program had misled the public, breaching UK broadcast standards. The program has been under increased monitoring since the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, which has been blamed on Russia.

Sky fudges figures in ratings boast. Sky News joined in the half-year TV ratings boasting yesterday, declaring its highest ratings on record in the first half of 2018 and claiming the title of “one of the leading channels on subscription television and number one across Foxtel in key evening timeslots.” But how do they figure that claim? Fox Footy and Fox League have more viewers each week and the Fox Footy show 360 regularly tops the nightly ratings. Instead of using the per-episode ratings that Oztam produces for mainstream TV, Sky is relying on average weekly audiences.

The press release also makes claims about several programs without giving any actual figures — “Sunday nights have delivered the biggest weekly audience increase for Paul Murray Live; up 139%”. But from what to what? For example, going from five to 10 viewers a week is an increase of 100%. — Glenn Dyer

Netflix shares slump. Netflix shares dropped 14% this morning after it delivered weak (by its standards) quarterly subscriptions that the company acknowledged rather than ignored (as tech companies do when revealing underperformance). The company revealed that instead of adding the 6.2 million new subscribers it had forecast in April, a total of 5.2 million were signed up. Normally that would be solid news, but because it was a million short of forecast, down went the shares, wiping more than US$26 billion from the company’s market value.

That raised questions about the sustainability of the tech share rally (really the giant tech share rally — Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft). Quarterly results from Microsoft later this week will now be watched more closely for any signs of a slowdown in its strong growth of the past couple of years. The quarterly results from Facebook, Apple and especially Amazon in the next fortnight will hold the key — any signs of a stumble and investors will head for the hills. — Glenn Dyer

Glenn Dyer’s TV Ratings. It happens every time: Post World Cup Let Down Syndrome. You go looking for the schedule of games, and there’s none! Then there’s the rest day hiatus syndrome on the Tour de France — thankfully sanity will be restored by the first of the mountain stages in the Alps tonight. And then you are forced to confront your TV devils — will it be MasterChef, House Rules, Australian Ninja failures, or Have You Been Paying Attention — the latter is at least amusing. Nine won the night in total people and the demos. Ten did well, Seven hung in there. Read the rest on the Crikey website.