BoltWatch

Dedicated to those who can tell the difference between A. Bolt and a nut.

Where Andrew Bolt's Deranged Polemic ... Gets What's Coming To It

Monday, October 31, 2005

Our money
Andrew Bolt in his forum on Friday:

...but I do mind that our money goes to fund something so biased and, in my view, dishonest.

Has Andrew finally decided to stand up and criticise the taxpayer-funded Liberal party advertising campaign on its proposed IR changes?

Dream on.

No, sadly, he's just complaining about the Media Watch broadcast on Monday that he thinks was mean to him. Bolt has no problem with taxpayer funds - $40 million of them so far - being spent on clearly political (and biased) advertisements dishonestly claiming to be about imparting information (despite there being no actual IR legislation yet to explain).

Andrew is perfectly happy for taxpayers to spend millions on that sort of bias and dishonesty.

But when a taxpayer-funded ABC program cruelly reminds viewers of what he wrote earlier in the year - well, that sort of "bias" and "dishonesty" is just wrong.

- posted by Jeremy @ 9:37 AM |
Friday, October 28, 2005

Bolt 28/10: "What, jail Pilger?"
Incredibly stupid article from Bolt today, in which he pretends that Media Watch on Monday claimed that he, Bolt, wanted to put himself on a metaphorical jury to jail Tony Jones and John Pilger under the enhanced "sedition" powers proposed by the Coalition. (Media Watch didn't actually do anything of the sort, of course, but Andrew isn't going let that get in the way of a good rant.)

Still, it's a fairly illustrative example of the techniques he uses to confuse his readers when he goes on one of his "the ABC's a bunch of communists who are out to get me" rants, so we might as well go through it.

In typical Bolt style he commences with an extreme claim, which he then leaves hanging for ten or twenty paragraphs before he gets around to putting it in context or backing it up.

So, we start with the big claim -
AMAZED, I was, to turn on the television on Monday and see I was jailing not only foul John Pilger, but nice Tony Jones.

Gosh, there I'd been, thinking the Howard Government's new anti-terrorism laws were milder than their hyperventilating critics claim.

But here was the ABC's Media Watch, suggesting they were actually so sinister I'd personally be jailing Leftist journalists.


And then, while those with common sense are thinking "hey, did Media Watch really say that?" and those without are thinking "oh Andrew, I take everything you say at face value, and this is further evidence of the lefty ABC conspiracy against you in which I, too, fervently believe", Bolt immediately lunges off elsewhere:

But let me paint you the big picture before I tell how the ABC drew me into its dark one.
Or, "let me distract you with something else so when I get around to describing what Media Watch has actually said, you've forgotten what I claimed at the beginning".

He then goes on to give defending the proposed laws a red-hot go. And what techniques does he use? Well, the tried and true ones.

Here's one technique - link all your opponents in together, so that a reasonable critic from a civil liberties group finds his or her criticism (that giving police powers such as two weeks' imprisonment without charge is a step towards a police state) mixed in with one which is perhaps less logical ("the US is the only country in the world to be found guilty of state terrorism"). The viewpoint of the reasonable opponent is mocked by linking it with the unreasonable one.

To give an example in reverse. It'd be like saying "Andrew Bolt warns that the stolen generation didn't happen. Neo-nazi groups like the Patriotic Youth League argue that not only didn't it happen, but that it's part of a conspiracy by the aborigines to take power from the white race." You see? By shoving the entire side of the opposing argument together, you reduce it to its weakest and most loony part.

Eventually Bolt gets back to Media Watch. Now, at the start he made some pretty serious claims about what Media Watch had said on Monday. What's he write at this point?
Media Watch then claimed these sedition clauses would jail journalists, too. As proof, it showed Pilger telling Jones last year it was "incredibly important" for the United States to be defeated in Iraq, to stop it also invading Iran, North Korea and China. You know, the good guys.

(If you're not with me on the Media Watch thing yet, remember that Pilger is in favour of brutal authoritarian dictatorships! With me yet?)

Then came this:
Jones: Can you approve in that context the killing of American, British or Australian troops who are in the occupying forces?

Pilger: Well yes, they're legitimate targets. They're illegally occupying a country. And I would have thought, from an Iraqi's point of view, they are legitimate targets. They have to be, sure.

Media Watch host Liz Jackson then protested that Pilger's comments could now get him jailed under the Government's new laws. She said a lawyer told her some viewers might think he was "urging or inviting any person to engage in the conduct of the forceful elimination of Australian troops". Or, in honest English, that he was telling people to kill our soldiers.

"Now you may not be a Pilger fan, but do you really want to silence him like that?" pleaded Jackson.


Fair point. Is Bolt going to clarify that this wouldn't happen under the new laws?

SOME soldiers might think yes, indeed, if Pilger's words put them in danger. They should not have to pay for his vanity with their lives.

Not before implying that Pilger should be put on trial after all, he isn't. But he's not really saying that directly. No, it's just a device for saying what he really thinks without being called on it. ("Some soldiers might think").

But Jackson went further, claiming even Jones could be jailed now, for having a Pilger on his show.

Again, if you're denying it, Andrew, perhaps you might show us the relevant clause of the draft legislation and explain how you've formed your view that Jackson and her lawyer are wrong.

That's when she scared you with my picture: "Before you say 'but no sane jury would convict them for that', check what . . . Andrew Bolt wrote about Pilger's comments at the time. It wasn't, he said, just Pilger who was the traitor and the enemy in our midst, it was also the ABC, who gave his views a platform."

And she quoted a column I'd written more than a year ago: "On Wednesday Pilger appeared on ABC TV's Lateline to promote his noxious views. This apologist for terrorists -- this moral pygmy -- is . . . welcomed into an ABC studio and promoted by SBS." So that's how Media Watch had me on a jury that jailed both Jones and Pilger for sedition under Adolf Howard's Nazi laws.

Dream on, Liz. I'd never have voted to jail them and doubt most Australians would. You'd have to be dumb or dishonest not to see the difference between despising Pilger's words and wanting him behind bars.

Er, Andrew, that doesn't make any sense. Jackson wasn't putting you "on a jury that jailed both Jones and Pilger for sedition". She was putting you as a supporting witness, at most, based on your use of the expressions "traitor" and "enemy". Only a bizarrely paranoid reading of Jackson's remark could lead a person to conclude that they're saying what you think they're saying.

Or, in his own words, you'd have to be dumb or dishonest not to see the difference between showing that Andrew Bolt despises Pilger's words and suggesting that he'd jail him if he got the chance.

Bolt wants it both ways, of course:

Yet even if Howard's new laws will make a Pilger fret that he'd face charges if he urged the killing of Australians, can this be so bad?


I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT PILGER SHOULD FACE CHARGES. (BUT MAYBE HE SHOULD FACE CHARGES.)

Hilarious. (But not really.)

- posted by Jeremy @ 10:14 PM |

Bolt 26/10: "Trinkets For Sale"
Guest post by "Scribe"

There's a few things that need to be noted about “Trinkets for Sale.”

In the first place, the timing of the article is too planned to be coincidental. Bolt assures his forum readers that the fact that three awards were handed last week was his inspiration. Those three awards went to journalists at The Age. So it begs the question - would we have seen such a column if the three awards had been won by Herald Sun or other News Limited journalists?

Would Bolt have had the same inspiration to criticise members of his own team? Not likely.

If Terry McCrann won an award from the Business Council for his stories (which support the IR reforms) would Bolt have published an article criticising McCrann for writing stories to a favourable audience? Not a chance.

That's the tough thing about criticising this aspect of journalism. If you're going to cast an eagle eye over the process, best include your colleagues as well. You'd hate for it to look like you were just seizing the chance to sink the boot into your rivals.

Secondly, the glaring omission of the News Limited awards was staggering. If we're discussing flimsy awards, should we not mention your own in-house prizes Andrew?

The Herald Sun had the arrogance to publish a page online celebrating all the awards the paper had been nominated for by its own company! What should we have expected? The publisher of the Herald Sun saying the paper was a waste of time? Don't insult our intelligence.

And be wary of all this “I don't enter media awards,” curtseying. Mr Oh-So-Humble isn't quite delivering the full truth. No he doesn't enter the awards- and nor would he- the awards go to general news journalists. Andrew is a commentator. There's nothing valiant in this move.

Given Andrew's dedication to even-handedness, can we expect a critical column next time three News Limited journalists pick up awards in a week? Watch the pigs take flight.

- posted by Jeremy @ 7:16 AM |
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Bolt-related Bits and Pieces (including Unsubstantiated Rumours!)
If you're interested, there appears to be a bit of a furore at RMIT over Bolt's August 17 attack on an RMIT lecturer and subsequent efforts to terminate him. Indymedia has the story.

On the issue of disclosure by journalists of their political links, it also appears (from an anonymous source, so I can't back this up) that Andrew recently found himself on the Liberal Party payroll. He was in SA a few weeks ago, paid by the party to give a talk to Christians at the Paradise Community Centre (Pentacostal audience). What about, we don't know. Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course - he's perfectly entitled to do so - but it may be relevant to note, given his regular claims of party-political neutrality.

A flimsy post? Well, if he'd write something of substance for us to critique...

- posted by Jeremy @ 6:52 PM |
Sunday, October 23, 2005

Bolt 21/10: "Author Overboard"
Guest post by Bridgit Gread.

Bolt is back to his ugly, populist best in ‘Author Overboard’, again telling his adoring public how irrevocably good they are – and how the writers and artists who suggest otherwise are just twisted spectres of the Left. It’s mainly David Williamson who cops it here, chiefly for this Bulletin article he wrote last week - however, the arguments offered are not new: it’s Andrew Bolt preaching to his converted about how the Left hates them and thinks them uncivilised, uneducated and unworthy. It’s a well his columns have visited many, many times before – and his intention is as visible as a turd in spring water.

Read Williamson’s article – which, let’s fact it, Bolt neither wants nor expects most of his readers to do – and it soon becomes clear why it has attracted his vitriol. The playwright discusses “right-wing columnists and commentators” and their obsession with the “wanky…elites”; and he mentions Bolt by name (regulars here will know how a specific citation can raise Bolt’s hackles). Williamson’s contention is that most Australians are materialistic, uninquiring and driven by commercial superficiality. Bereft of a counter-argument, Bolt does his usual number and ridicules Williamson as an out-of-touch, arty-farty wanker. He throws up his usual grab-bag of quotations – hand-picked like the soft-centres from a box of Cadbury chocolates – to aid his cause.

As is almost always the case, Andrew doesn’t always tell you the full story. Williamson does indeed criticise his cruise-mates’ materialism and lack of interest in foreign culture and history, though he commends their “warmth and affection” and their “civility”. He describes them as fundamentally decent people but despairs when, at a port stop in Noumea, barely 20 of the 2000 onboard decide to take in a “marvellous” collection of native art. They instead frequent the Club Med, the tacky shopping markets and boutiques, the quality of which constitute much of the conversation upon their return (the coffee shop was “ratshit”, the sandwiches “like cardboard”). Williamson questions as much as criticises this lack of engagement with or sensitivity to foreign culture. Bolt does nothing to answer this point; to him they are just “happy Australians” victimised by a “vomitous” (sic) artist. Unable to provide a cogent rebuttal and with column inches to fill, Bolt then moves on to a rehash of previous criticisms of a book written in 1964.

Then, grasping for a writer who reflects his own faith in the suburban masses, Bolt tags Arnold Bennett, an English novelist of the early 20th century. After claiming Bennett was “the son of a shopkeeper” (his father was actually a solicitor) Bolt goes on to describe Bennett as a man who could “see the suburbs were in fact home to people of courage, of dignity, of honour, of dreams, of romance, of art.” He neglects to mention that Bennett, during World War I, was actually co-opted by the British government’s War Propaganda Bureau, an agency that recruited several famous writes – including Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesteron – to write ‘inspiring’ pro-war pieces. When Bennett toured the Western Front in 1915, he was rendered physically sick and emotionally traumatised by sights and smells of trench warfare… yet he returned to write “Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front”, which gave a positive, almost glowing impression of a soldier’s life.

This is Andrew Bolt’s idea of a great writer: a government stooge, a war propagandist and a liar who knew the reality of battle and yet still induced more to take part. Heaven save us from the Arnold Bennetts and give us a cynical but honest David Williamson any day.

- posted by Jeremy @ 8:17 AM |
Friday, October 21, 2005

Bolt: would you believe $17 million?
You remember my question of Bolt in the last post - if he's such a great watchdog of government spending (he devoted an entire column on Wednesday to whinging about an art exhibition he didn't like), why hasn't he been in any way critical of the Government's obscenely expensive IR propaganda campaign?

Bolt's response to questions about this on his forum has been simply to claim that the $100 million figure (which is what the GST campaign cost in 2000) is "out by 600%". Really? What figure is Bolt quoting instead?

Howard's Government has spent $15 million in the first two weeks of its publicly-funded propaganda campaign. (Remember - its justification is that it's in the national interest to restore its popularity after the union campaign against it.) This is far more than it spent on the first two weeks of the $100 million GST campaign. So that figure is bound to be an underestimate, if anything.

Although, 600% of $15 million is close to $100 million - is Bolt trying to pretend that the two weeks' spending we've endured so far will be the end of the campaign? He couldn't be that disingenuous to his readers, could he?

Well, Andrew - if you're so confident it's not going to cost the taxpayer $100 million, would you care to name a figure, or a range, that you think it will cost us instead - and be held to it?

- posted by Jeremy @ 3:04 PM |
Saturday, October 15, 2005

IR Campaign
You know, Andrew is usually very quick to criticise government mis-spending.

But he's been very quiet over those $100 million IR advertisements.

I thought his brief was to fight waste and sloth wherever he found it.

Quick questions for Andrew - do you agree with the Liberals spending (extraordinarily large amounts of) public money on an "information" campaign for legislation the detail of which hasn't yet been released?* How can this be an "information" campaign? Is this EVER justified? Why? How?

*For example - ring the "WorkChoices" hotline and ask them "Under these changes, will the minimum wage be protected from inflation?" They can't answer, because there is no answer yet. (At least, not that the Government is prepared to disclose.)

(I'll get to both Andrew's silly defence of Virgin Blue's only hiring one flight attendant over 36 out of 750 as not being discriminatory at all, and his equally silly response to Tim Flannery, in a day or two. But I think this is the real issue at the moment, and if Bolt wants some credibility next time he complains about Government waste, he needs to either explain his support for the IR campaign, or why when it's waste by the Howard Government, he doesn't seem to care.)

- posted by Jeremy @ 7:00 AM |
Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Bolt 12/10: "A right goes wrong".
The Victorian Privacy Commissioner has apparently just funded and fought a case in VCAT on the issue of whether the police should have given the mugshot of a man arrested and charged with rape to newspapers. Andrew Bolt is very annoyed.

THE police were rather astonished. Perhaps they believe, as I do, that suffering shame as a rapist is not a deliberate punishment, but a natural and healthy consequence of what Smith had done to two elderly and terrified women.


Two issues.

Firstly, it's not clear from Bolt's article whether, or when, the bloke concerned was convicted of the offence. After conviction, there's no such barrier preventing newspapers from publishing photographs of people convicted of crimes. Before conviction, there clearly is.

Because obviously, it makes a huge difference.

You go publishing photographs of people merely accused of crimes, and there's a great risk of enormous injustice. More than just injustice to the alleged criminal - there's a risk that juries will be contaminated and cases will have to be thrown out.

I'm not familiar with this case in particular, but surely if Bolt expects us to take his article seriously, that's the sort of basic question that should be answered first.

Secondly, why should mugshots be given to newspapers anyway? The newspapers can take their own photographs. The police mugshots are taken for police purposes only, not the interests of newspaper proprietors.

You want to publish the photo, you take it yourself.

IN any case, it's an article that smacks of easy populist demagoguery - you pick a category of villain, and you attack anyone who suggests limits on what we do to those people. The Bracks Labor Government is opposed to whipping sex offenders through the streets and cutting off their limbs! So they're SOFT ON SEX OFFENDING! Bastards!

You get the idea.

- posted by Jeremy @ 7:27 PM |
Friday, October 07, 2005

Bolt 7/10: "There's no sorry, only silence" and "Terror by degrees"
A delightfully misleading little swipe from Andrew Bolt today on the subject of the Bakhtiyari family.

In "There's no sorry, only silence", Bolt demands an apology from everyone who believed (or believes) that the Bakhtiyaris were from Afghanistan rather than Pakistan.

(Because Andrew's such a huge demander of apologies from his own side, of course.)

I GUESS we shouldn't believe even the admission this week by the Bakhtiari boys that their family lied when it claimed to be Afghan refugees.

And we should ignore Alamdar Bakhtiari's claim, made on ABC's Lateline, that some refugee activists "used our family". Surely all these good activists couldn't have misled us?


First of all, whilst the Bakhtiyari boys admitted that they had lived in Islamabad, they are clear that they travelled here with Pakistani visas in their Afghan passports. So I don't see how that means they're not Afghan refugees.

And they were also clear that the reason they were slamming their former advocates was because they want the Government to give them another chance at getting in. Their erstwhile allies, who have worked hard exhausting all their other options, can't help them any more. But the Government can. If they can help it with a bit of anti-left propaganda, perhaps...

In any case, let's pretend that Bolt was right, and the Bakhtiyaris weren't from Afghanistan, as he claims. I still don't see that there'd much for which the the Bakhtiyaris' defenders should apologise. Of course their claims should have been properly tested, which is all we asked.

And the criticisms made of the tactics and techniques used by the government don't suddenly become invalid if the Bakhtiyaris turn out to be from country A instead of country B. The point that the left raised was that the Bakhtiyaris were excluded when there was a good case that they were from where they said they were from; and even if they turn out to have been lying, the point is that future refugees in similar instances, with the same attack applied, will find themselves excluded where they should not be.

An analogy - if we were to start randomly locking people up, eventually we'd be sure to lock up someone who deserved it. But that fluke would not be sufficient to endorse the flawed policy.

In other words, if the government fluked being right in this case, there's no reason for us to have any confidence that its approach will result in justice in other similar cases. The system is still flawed. The criticisms are still valid.

And it's certainly not the refugee advocates who should apologise.

* * *

Bolt's other piece today, "Terror by degrees", is stunning in its overt referencing of the anti-communist scare campaigns of the 1950s. He cites one of the science fiction horror films of the time - The Thing From Another World - and applies it to the HORRIBLE MONSTER THAT IS MODERN TERRORISM.

How very today that now all sounds, as we hear new experts urging us to negotiate with Islamist terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, or buy them off by, say, abandoning democratic Iraq.

Let's see. There's the monster who grows stronger with blood. There's the contempt of an intellectual for an armed response. His faith that monsters can be talked into reason. His belief that it's our failing to seem nice that's the real problem.


It's like film-makers of the fifties really understood our modern struggle!

Or, more depressingly, perhaps they would have recognised the techniques used to fight it, only too well.

Reading political meaning into those films is, of course, hardly new. They were always thinly-veiled allegories of the struggle against communism. (Sometimes they were thinly-veiled parodies of it, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Oh my god! They're pod people!)

What is more interesting than Andrew Bolt's attempt to illustrate how monstrous terrorism is (in case we were confused), is how readily the comparison is made between the "reds under the bed" techniques his ideological comrades used fifty years ago, and the "islamists under the bed" techniques he uses today.

I had always thought we'd moved on from being quite as naive and easily-cowed as we were back then. Turns out the Government knows full-well that we're not (see its proposed new "anti-terrorist" legislation).

And so does Andrew Bolt.

- posted by Jeremy @ 9:52 AM |

Portions of any work of Andrew Bolt are taken from his webpage at http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/, are copyright Andrew Bolt, and are reproduced on the basis of the "fair dealing for purpose of criticism or review" section 41 of the Copyright Act 1968. Other material is copyright by its various authors, which sort of goes without saying really.