Andrew Bolt - is he a credible journalist?

[Squawk]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/10/2923180.htm?site=thedrum

This is an extract of the "Bolt" bit from an otherwise much longer article.

There was one other intervention by the Prime Minister's office this week which went virtually unreported, but deserves closer scrutiny and debate.

Noted Melbourne conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, was apparently barred from interviewing Kevin Rudd.

On Tuesday, the production team behind Steve Price at the new talk station, MTR, was given five minutes notice that the Prime Minister was available for interview. The call came during the 40-minute segment when Bolt joins Price and routinely takes part in all of the interviews. In fact, when the call came through, he was on air and jointly interviewing the mayor of a remote Western Australian town, hosting asylum seekers.

Bolt says: "At the request of his office, I'm out the door while he chats to Steve alone.

"Rudd is entitled to chose who to talk to, and the station is entitled to decide that it is well worth having a professional like Steve interview him, even if I can't.

"But I'm entitled to draw conclusions when Rudd won't talk to me, and so are you."

Curious if the Prime Minister's office specifically barred a particular journalist; even more curious that MTR would not insist that they decide who stays in their studio and the circumstances in which they stay. The new station, at the very least, may have missed a valuable publicity opportunity; and at best an interview that would have warranted far more than five minutes notice.

[Ronnie]

Bolt's targets are on the left of course, but you wouldn't expect 4 Corners for example to do a dirt story on the union movement.

[Gozu]

"Radio host defends ratings flop":

Melbourne’s newest radio station, MTR 1377, has failed to make an impact, attracting an average audience of just 10,000 people and a market share of 1.7 per cent in this morning’s ratings report.

Media analyst Steve Allen said: ‘‘I’m sure [MTR] would be disappointed with the result ... but they wouldn’t be greatly concerned’’. ‘‘Going down is to be expected when you aren’t fully established,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll have to wait until the next survey to get a better indication.’’

During the 7pm to midnight slot, an average of just 4000 people tuned in.

‘‘You could almost put that down to friends and family,’’ said a source from another station.

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/ ... -ytw1.html

[Leaping Lindner]

Heartbreaking

Seriously though I can't see MTR doing that big a things. It's not that the great unwashed in Melbourne don't like crap, right wing bias media, they just prefer it with a gentler edge (3AW/Herald Sun) as opposed to the aggressive shock jock mentality that exists in Sydney.
Steve Price may have made misjudged his southern audience after so long up North!

[Leaping Lindner]

Bolt's targets are on the left of course, but you wouldn't expect 4 Corners for example to do a dirt story on the union movement.

Apart from the BLF and the Builder's Worker's Industrial Union you mean . Four Corners isn't left wing it's just that other media in this country has gone so far to the right that by being balanced they appear left wing.

[Psyber]

Bolt's targets are on the left of course, but you wouldn't expect 4 Corners for example to do a dirt story on the union movement.

Apart from the BLF and the Builder's Worker's Industrial Union you mean .
Four Corners isn't left wing it's just that other media in this country has gone so far to the right that by being balanced they appear left wing.

That's what you lefties always claim when your propaganda branches are pointed out..
In reality "centre" is determined by the swinging voter.

[redandblack]

We 'lefties' can happily point out that the vast, vast majority of commentators are right-wing by any reasonable definition, no matter how you personally incorrectly define it.

Given that you won't concede that Rudd's stimulus plan helped avoid a recession, I don't expect you to agree with me on this, either.

[Gozu]

Bolt's targets are on the left of course, but you wouldn't expect 4 Corners for example to do a dirt story on the union movement.

Here is an example of that 4 Corners bias, I can't link to the article as you have to be a subscriber to Crikey so I've cut and pasted it.

"What did Four Corners know and when did they know it?":

by Bernard Keane

On 26 April Four Corners put to air a program “A Lethal Miscalculation”, about the Government’s insulation program. The program concentrated on the death of Matthew Fuller, who died from electrocution in October 2009. His girlfriend, Monique Pridmore, was seriously injured as well. The program purported to reveal that the Government had wilfully ignored multiple warnings about safety in the administration of the program, in favour of rapid rollout to support jobs during the GFC-induced economic slowdown.

Many of the claims centred on allegations made by a Departmental whistleblower. This was probably — given how rare APS leakers are — the same whistleblower who sold the Herald-Sun a load of garbage back in February. In that story, it was claimed Garrett had ignored “hundreds” of emails about safety issues — although this then turned out to be that a senior bureaucrat “who answered directly to the Minister” had received the emails, not the Minister himself.

As any public servant worth their shiny backside knows, no bureaucrats answer directly to Ministers. They answer indirectly, through their own Public Service superiors and the minister’s own advisers and chief of staff.

The confused Herald-Sun story might have alerted 4 Corners that their whistleblower was either so junior or new to the APS as to not understand the simplest management concepts, or knew less about the insulation saga than they claimed.

Four Corners also relied extensively shadow minister Greg Hunt and on the grieving family of Mr Fuller, who blamed the Government for their son’s death. “The cost of the government’s home insulation program has been great,” reporter Wendy Carlisle said at the end of the program. “Lives lost. Houses razed. A massive clean up. And for the Fullers, there is only the government to blame.”

Less than two weeks after the program aired, Fuller’s employer, QHI and its directors, father and son Christopher John and Christopher William McKay, were charged by Queensland authorities in relation to the incident in which Fuller and Pridmore were electrocuted. 4 Corners interviewed the older McKay for the program about the events leading up to Mr Fuller’s death, but McKay’s comments only served as a prelude to an extensive attack on the Government’s oversight of the program.

Four days before the program aired, the report by former bureaucrat Allan Hawke into the program was released. The report received widespread coverage. 4 Corners ignored the report entirely, whilst complaining that Peter Garrett and Greg Combet had declined to be interviewed for the program.

Crikey asked Four Corners whether the production team for “A Lethal Miscalculation” had read the report, and if so why it wasn’t mentioned. Executive producer Sue Spencer replied “the report was carefully read and its findings checked against the script of the program. Minister Combet refused to be interviewed by the program. The full Hawke report was provided on the Four Corners website.”

Spencer also pointed to the report’s conclusion that any replacement program should not proceed without a proper regulatory and compliance regime in place to ensure safety, and that given the priority of the rectification scheme the Government had put in place, consideration should be given to not proceeding with a replacement scheme.

That seems to be Four Corners’ single take from the Hawke Report Crikey reader John Kotsopoulos complained about the program via the ABC’s laborious complaints assessment process (laborious chiefly because it was made that way to fend off persistent Coalition criticisms of bias). Kotsopoulos was also told that the Four Corners regarded those conclusions as, in the words of ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs’ Kieran Doyle, the “bottom line” of Hawke’s report.

Four Corners appears guilty of cherry-picking. Hawke said in his report “any objective assessment of the HIP will conclude that, despite the safety, quality and compliance concerns, there were solid achievements against the program objectives” and, in relation to claims the program was “bungled”, “bungle is actually a furphy because the many positive outcomes (already and potentially) flowing from the [program] serve to address long standing problems besetting the industry.”

This is because the industry was remarkably unsafe before the HIP program, with 20% of Queensland homes found to have pre-existing electrical faults, and at least 80 and probably more fires a year due to faulty installation of insulation. Far from neglecting to address safety issues in favour of rapid roll-out, Hawke says the relevant Department, DEWHA tried hard to address them through training and accreditation programs, but was let down by taking too long to undertake a by-the-book procurement process for a proper auditing and compliance system to vet installers, and by underestimating demand and the bureaucratic resources needed to oversee the program.

As for the specific role of Garrett, “the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts was briefed on these issues and responses by both Mr Garrett and DEWHA were appropriate and timely.” Hawke went on to say “when issues arose, DEWHA and the Minister worked quickly to address them. DEWHA engaged with industry, listened to their concerns and briefed the Minister on necessary changes to the program. Warnings were heeded; however, this was largely reactive.”

None of this is addressed in Four Corners, which made what in hindsight is a remarkable decision to ignore a key report on the exact issues it was making allegations about. 4 Corners preferred the unevidenced claims of a whistleblower over the independent review of an experienced ex-department head from the Howard era. One got an extensive interview, the other got stuck on the website.

Asked why they cherry-picked the report in their justification, the ABC told Kotsopoulos “the ABC has noted the section of the Hawke report that you have highlighted [which I have quoted above]. However, it cannot agree that by not including that statement or focussing on that particular aspect of the report, that the broadcast lacked balance or unduly favoured any one view over another… balance was achieved in keeping with the Corporation’s editorial standards, through the presentation of a range of principal relevant perspectives. Audience and Consumer Affairs believes the broadcast is in keeping with section 5 of the ABC Editorial Policies.”

At worst, Four Corners is guilty of selectively using evidence in a manner that is downright deceptive. I don’t think that was the case. More likely, I’d suggest, is that the Hawke Report didn’t fit the simple narrative Four Corners wanted to run — not so much because it found no evidence that either Garrett or DEWHA had failed to act on warnings (thereby entirely contradicting the claims of their “whistleblower”), but because it offered a complex story of what happened.

The reasons why the program led to so many shonks badly installing insulation across the country lay not in simplistic stereotypes of bumbling bureaucrats or incompetent ministers, but in more complex issues: the designers of the program were worried about low take-up, and wanted to stimulate demand.

A proper Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines-based tender process for a compliance and auditing mechanism took too long, because DEWHA didn’t want to cut corners (when, of course, corner-cutting is one of the things they’ve since been accused of). No one expected householders to so readily abrogate responsibility for what was going on in their ceilings because they had no money at risk. And senior officials didn’t swing extra resources into the relevant area quickly enough.

None of that came through in Four Corners. It might have made for a less emotive and interesting program, but it would have done a better job of informing viewers of what really happened.

[Psyber]

We 'lefties' can happily point out that the vast, vast majority of commentators are right-wing by any reasonable definition, no matter how you personally incorrectly define it.
Given that you won't concede that Rudd's stimulus plan helped avoid a recession, I don't expect you to agree with me on this, either.

I guess you are right.
I was playfully suggesting - hence the - that if the voters are fairly evenly divided between the major parties in the election or in the polls overall, then the centre must be somewhere between their declared policies, and in that case, those publications that lean one way are statistically "Left", and those that lean the other are "Right".

The alternative is to draw a centre line where you think it should be and obviously then most people, and most media, may be on the "wrong" side whether you call that "Right" or "Left" from your perspective.
[Back in the later 1980s for example I saw both the Labor and Liberal parties as a bit right wing for my taste - just different forms of right wing.]

[Gozu]

Bolt caught out again, "Is internal consistency too much to ask?"

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... ch-to-ask/

[Cambridge Clarrie]

Is Bolt a credible journalist?

Well, he called todays events earlier than anyone else I know...

The points he's made about Rudd seem to be validated by the actions of the Prime Minister's own party...

[Leaping Lindner]

Heard this one today. Too good not to share.

BOLT

Blank
Out
Logical
Thought

[Gozu]

"Real Andrew Bolt is wrong, says Fake Andrew Bolt":

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/04/rea ... drew-bolt/

"Thunderous Bolt sensitive to parody":

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2972981.htm

[Gozu]

"MTR cops ratings hammering":

Despite launching amid a blaze of publicity, MTR has claimed the title of Melbourne’s worst-performing radio station in its first full ratings period.

The right-wing talkback station has an average audience of just 8000, according to this morning’s Nielsen report.

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/ ... 11wf2.html

[Gozu]

"Boltageddon!":

Does it occur to anyone else that the missing vital ingredient in Andrew’s alarmist story is actually a basis in fact?

Another possibility is that Andrew is feeding eight year old news to his readers as a way to cushion them from some of the more frightening realities of the last decade, I’m sure that he’ll let them know that there were no WMDs found in Iraq any day now.

Of course there’s no chance that he just posts any old tosh that his readers send him without trying to verify it, serious journalists don’t do that sort of thing.

I guess that with no asteroid to wipe the planet out in 2019 we’ll all just have to get back to worrying about climate change after all.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... ltageddon/

[Gozu]

"MTR sheds a quarter of it's audience":

Struggling right-wing broadcaster MTR has shed a quarter of its average audience and has again claimed the title of Melbourne's lowest-ratings station.

MTR now has an average of just 6000 listeners — down from 8000 — and attracts only 1.1 per cent of the available audience, according to this morning's Nielsen report.

Program director and breakfast host Steve Price said he was disappointed but "determined to make it work".

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/ ... 15a88.html

[Gozu]

"Andrew Bolt sued under Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act":

HERALD Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is being sued under the Racial Vilification Act by a group of Aborigines led by 73-year-old activist Pat Eatock over two columns he wrote last year.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/09/19/ot ... rance-act/

[Gozu]

"Shoe-thrower "discredits only himself":

Shoeless idiot demonstrates failures of the Left

Then again – haven’t I read you complaining about people judging conservatives by the fringe-nutters in the US Tea Party movement? Why does that principle not apply to your opponents?

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... y-himself/

[Gozu]

"Consistently inconsistent":

The Herald Sun’s freedom of information specialist, Andrew Bolt, seems to be having a difficult time choosing where he stands on Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

One minute Assange is “Drawing up a suggestion list for Osama”, which presumably should be condemned, but the next he’s worth quoting because a different cable reveals “The US on Rudd: a blundering “control freak””.

One day in Boltworld, “Assange is the neo-con’s friend”, and a week later “Assange arrested. The Leftist tribe protects its own”.

You have to hand it to Andrew, he knows how to give his readers everything that they want. He condemns Wikileaks when it suits his need to take a swipe at ‘the Left”, or as he put it today, “the class of the Perpetually Irresponsible.”, but he has no qualms about republishing information from Wikileaks when it helps him make an argument.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... /#comments

[Gozu]

Bolt continues to plumb new depths, "TRAGEDY USED":

The bodies are still being recovered, and at least one News Ltd columnist is already trying to capitalise politically on the Christmas Island tragedy:

Blood on their hands

Resign, Julia. Your laws, and you were warned. And when you – yes, you – were warned 14 months ago that at least 25 people, by my count, had drowned already…

…the deaths of so many people, lured to their doom by her laws…

Repulsive. Ghoulish.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2 ... gedy-used/