Five reasons why fact-checking matters. Guardian Australia published a listicle on the Indonesian election on Monday afternoon with the headline “Five reasons why the Indonesian election matters“. The first is because it is a “mega-democracy”.

We had no idea Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had been in power for 16 years. It seems like just 2004 when he became president. While it’s true Yudhoyono was the first directly elected president, presidents Habibie, Wahid and Sukarnoputri (Indonesia’s first female president) would probably not be thrilled to be rubbed out of history like that.

But wait, there’s more. The second reason to care about Indonesia’s election is its healthy economy …

This one’s less important, but the MINT countries are actually Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. Comments began appearing on the story correcting the record on Monday, but The Guardian had not changed the story or issued a correction as of Crikey‘s press time.

Mad world. Conservative peer Lord Deben (John Gummer) got a lot of publicity this week in the Fairfax Media papers and on the ABC criticising the Abbott government’s climate change policies. What else do we know of Lord Deben? In his former political life as a senior member of the UK Conservative government 24 years ago, he became notorious for one of the atrocities of UK politics when, at the height of the mad cow disease scandal, he tried to get his daughter to eat a hamburger in public, as the BBC explained:

“The government has again attempted to reassure the public that British beef is safe, despite growing fears over the cattle disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).

“The Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, even invited newspapers and camera crews to photograph him trying to feed a beefburger to his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, at an event in his Suffolk constituency.

“Although his daughter refused the burger, he took a large bite himself, saying it was ‘absolutely delicious’.”

No wonder Australians living in London at the time were wearing T-shirts urging people to “eat Australian beef, you’d be mad not to”. And those same Aussies can’t donate blood in Australia because of the slight chance their blood carries Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, caused by mad cow disease. — Glenn Dyer

Journalists and numbers. Journos are notoriously bad with numbers, but those in the business pages should perhaps have an extra incentive to check their subs. In this Fairfax Media story about a mystery Chinese Australian property developer, author Melanie Kembrey wrote:

“His company more than doubled its gross profit in 2013 and this year it will have more than 16.90 million square kilometres of land under construction.”

That’s almost the land area of Australia (7.692 million square kilometres) and China combined (9.707 million square kilometres). That’s some development — Glenn Dyer

Front page of the day. It’s The Wall Street Journal‘s 125th anniversary today, and to celebrate the august organ has republished its first front page …