“Unfair, unbalanced and savagely skewed to fit his ideological inclinations”
A newspaper writer discusses another member of his profession:
…whose writing I’ve often found to be unfair, unbalanced and savagely skewed to fit his ideological inclinations, sometimes to the point of melodrama.
I suspect everyone who’s stuck by Pure Poison to its final week can guess who it’s about, and who’s making the comment.
Yes, of course, it’s by Andrew Bolt, in his post about Miranda Devine’s special memories of Fairfax, talking about David Marr.
Yes, by Andrew Bolt, about someone else.
As I’m sure you realised.
Oh, for f**k’s sake.
Definitions from the right-wing columnists and talkback hosts’ dictionary:
“unfair” – holding and propagating any view position not in agreement with one’s own values or beliefs, especially if supported by evidence, logical argument or proof.
“Unbalanced” – any statement or evidence that supports a view contrary to ones’ own.
“Idealogical inclination” – any view or position with which one disagrees
“Skewed” – any statement or position that is unfavourable to a far right world view or which favours a moderate or left wing position.
Priceless. The ‘melodrama’ bit was where I almost choked on my weeties.
Every single one of Andrew’s columns : ‘Hey Kettle!’
A spectacular and deeply psychotic lack of self awareness… Marr is far from perfect but he certainly isn’t responsible for the bile and ignorance that Bolt is..
Amazing, isn’t it? He must be taking the piss with that, surely.
You’d almost swear that Andrew wasn’t present at his own trial.
The thing that I find most amusing about Andrew’s post is that at the end he offers a hat tip to a reader for bringing Miranda’s article to his attention. And here I thought that I was the only person who didn’t read their colleague’s work.
O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us
An’ ev’n Devotion
To a Louse
R Burns
Dark Matter is a type of matter hypothesized by astrophysicists to account for a large part of the total mass in the universe. It’s a bit elusive as it cannot be seen and apparently neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level. According to the authority of Wikipedia its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large scale structure of the universe. Dark matter is estimated to constitute 84% of the matter in the universe and 23% of the mass-energy.
So there is a whole lot of stuff out there we can’t see but so as to keep the glue of our present World View still sticking together Dark Matters helps us out.
So, too, with the Andrew Bolt Blog.
If you run a script to count the Comments on the Andrew Bolt Blog (Observable Universe) this is what you find per year (or at least I did, including assisting Robert Manne with this for the Finkelstein Media Inquiry):
2006: 41,785
2007: 173,768
2008: 313,978
2009: 294,600
2010: 436,213
2011: 354,185
But here is what the signature of ID comments in the html source code on the Andrew Bolt Blog tells us (roughly):
2005: 30,895
2006: 237,679
2007: 998,955
2008: 1,988,487
2009: 2,938,670
2010: 3,961,954
2011: 5,057,083
Applying some primary school arithmetic to this by subtracting the sum of one year from the next we get an estimate of the Total Comments (seen and unseen) in the Andrew Bolt Blog Universe per year:
2006: 206,784
2007: 761,276
2008: 989,532
2009: 950,183
2010: 1,023,284
2011: 1,095,129
Subtract the Observable Comments from the Total Comments and we get “Dark Matter” on the Andrew Bolt Blog! (or at least an estimate of it):
2006: 164,999 (79.79%)
2007: 587,508 (77.17%)
2008: 675,554 (68.27%)
2009: 655,583 (69.00%)
2010: 587,071 (57.37%)
2011: 740,944 (67.66%)
Those % figures in brackets give us a sense of scale — like measuring the Transit of Venus across the face of the Sun to scale our solar system.
Doing the sums for All Years 2006-2011 together we get 3,411,659 (67.88%) unseen comments.
Conclusion: if my calculations are right (and I am always right!) there is about 68% or so Dark Matter on the Andrew Bolt Blog.
Which is a good deal less than the estimated 84% of the matter in the universe for its astrophysics cousin. But give the Andrew Bolt Blog Universe some time to press on and maybe the unseen comments will grow.
What could constitute this Dark Matter? Well, that has ignited and tormented the imaginations of people since the first Andrew Bolt Blog post of 16 November 2000 The grandmothers I so gratefully gained (quite a nice post) — and especially since BoltA went on a tear from about July 2006 pumping up the posts to now about 4000 per year (after only posting 5 articles in the 6 years from 2000-2005).
We can only guess from the outside, but the Dark Matter will most likely consist of spam that the filters have rightly suppressed… but there could be a significant portion still… and this is only wildly guessing… there could be a significant number of genuine comments that were submitted but never published (some even critical of BoltA’s use of the Dark Arts of Sophistry)… and that could easily run to many thousands of comments. Could those comments be a lost tribe? — a few thousand innocents of Edward Lazarus who tried-to-decry:
Goodspeed! Pure Poison. You who are about to die. We salute you!
David Barrow
A truly remarkable thing to be written by Andrew.
I honestly can’t work out if he does it for the lolz (unless he’s incredibly dry – he doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humour), or if he in fact has drunk his own kool aid? How could anyone lack that much self awareness?
But this twisting of fact and logic is not unusual for Andrew. Today, he believes it is obvious a newspaper proprietor should influence what is written to protect their investment. If you don’t support that you are a group think lefty who hates capitalism and freedom of the press.
Yet within the last 12 months (I can’t really remember?) when his editors ordered him not to risk their business with further defamation cases against the story about Gillard and her involvement with union accounts used for illegal activities, he threatened to quit and lost News Ltd advertising dollars by shutting his blog for a day in protest.
And his inability to write about racial identity is not due to any specific Australian law (as other News Ltd employees do write about the issue), so I would suspect that directive again is coming from internal sources. That would mean it’s his paper’s proprietor that is stifling his free speech. He is now advocating a similar outcome at Fairfax.
I think the hair-splitting distinction he gave for supporting editorial interference by Reinhart at The Age while being opposed to it at the Herald Sun was that The Age needed to do something in order to save itself financially and Reinhart’s interference was somehow going to achieve this. So apparently he doesn’t realise Herald Sun sales are also down and falling.
David the LHC team are set to make an announcement on July 4 and rumour has it it’ll be the announcement of a discovery. A new particle, possibly the Rigs Bolta, which is one of those blog comments that are so hard to find that we can only know they exist by their effect on the thread length of other comment threads on other blogs.
Of course it could also be the Rigins Bolta which is a particle formed by tv studios to transmit sycophantic comments supporting print media owners if they are attempting to control rivals for their own advantage.
One more lolbolt.
“The ABC’s great conservative purge – Half the ABC’s conservative presenters have suddenly quit.”
Michael Duffy has resigned from the ABC to take up a job for the Qld Government.
I think that’s his idea of wit.
And this is the man invited (with Clive Palmer) to spread their propaganda during the Liberal Party two day conference??
Angra, he just repeated the gag from Quadrant. Interestingly enough, in today’s Crikey there was a story on ex ABC employees who enter the political sphere, and more than half go to the conservatives.
Bolt gives speeches for the Libs and yet he wonders why no Labor politicians will appear on his pretend television show.
Bloody typical Dave, that lefty trick of using facts to back up an argument. Pinko!
DG @16
Proof by repeated assertion. Andrew keeps saying it, but how does the ABC refute it when Andrew gets to decide who’s a conservative and who isn’t? I personally don’t think Andrew’s a conservative. I think real conservatives roll their eyes at andrew.
I think the whole “theirABC” thing has done a decent job of pointing out that, for every wild accusation of bias from the right, the left is able to show examples of bias TO the right (not that I think “left” or “right” are ideal, but they’ll do for now).
But bias isn’t the real problem that the right has with the ABC. Their problem is that they don’t control it. “The left” doesn’t control it either (despite what the wingnuts might think) but they have less of a problem with that because they appreciate having an alternative to the stuff that the right DOES control. At the moment, at this point in time and space, the left is much more comfortable with the objective-facts view of the world than the right is, and the ABC does a decent job of covering that.
To the right, the ABC is partly competition for advertising space and partly a threat to its control over the political narrative. I’ll be interested to see what tonez does with the ABC – howard was careful, because the ABC is valued outside of the Cities. Will abbott care, or will he go after it as a perceived (mistakenly, IMHO) ideological enemy?
Aliar @ 4;
I beg to differ.
Cheers.
MoC @ 19;
There’s an assumption in that statement that I wouldn’t make with such absolute certainty.
Cheers.
Howard outrageously stacked the board of the ABC with his ideological allies.
Just imagine the mouth-frothing rage if Labor did that. John also tried to destroy the ABC culture by appointing Jonathan Shier as CEO but had to let him go when he caused too much havoc. I expect that Tony will move quickly to nobble the ABC and prepare it for privatization. He will regard it as an enemy to be subjugated or destroyed.
Steve777,
Just the other day (21/6/12) our pollies passed the Bill from 2010 – that didn’t take long did it? – to re-instate the position of staff elected board member for the ABC. That was an “iron-clad” 2007 election promise given by Rudd to Kerry O’Brien.
There will be a ‘merit’ process, which sounds like it might work. Worst of all though, was the fact that despite needing the Greens to get the changes passed in the Senate, the ALP & LNP voted together to defeat a Greens amendment that would have introduced “..an absolute ban on former MPs and senior staffers being appointed to the board of the ABC.”
I liked this extract from Ludlam’s speech:
http://greensmps.org.au/content/speeches/speech-national-broadcasting-legislation-amendment-bill-2010-abc-board-bill
Dave & Jeremy
Bolt is indeed casting stones from out front his glass mansion if he proclaims himself as anything other than “unfair, unbalanced and savagely skewed to fit his ideological inclinations”.
I assume you two have forsaken any glass domiciles and readily acknowledge being a bit skewed and unbalanced
And you, Howard?
Unlike conservatives, my views are based on facts, logic and evidence, not fear, bigotry and irrational hatred of change.
Rich Uncle Skeleton
That statement suggests otherwise.
The world, and all us fallible humans within it, is not a neat dichotomy of those whose views are the product of only ‘facts, logic and evidence’ and those whose views are not.
Although, whilst your self-agrandising delusions of possessing the infallible judgement of God suggests you have a very tenuous relationship with facts, logic and evidence, it does confirm that you have a love of the smell of your own farts.
Notice how Howie avoided the question @25?
Howie always avoids the question. Its his thing.
“it does confirm that you have a love of the smell of your own farts.”
Citation needed.
Hello,
I’m a long-time lurker, first time poster on this site.
An observation – why is it that the rightards (not conservative – I’m sure they would disavow you all) who venture to post here always play the man and not the ball?
It seems without exception, well except for maybe SB – her comments just seem to be churned out by some automated cliche aggregator.
I don’t bother with the Boltas site, it’s all too predictable and I can get my exasperated eye-roll quota easily enough without having to pay for it elswhere.
Indiana – citation provided.
“Success is like a fart — only your own smells nice.”
James P. Hogan
Eccles – don’t use “rightard”, its offensive. Like Lleyton Hewitt calling an umpire “spastic” – which he did until called to account by the Cerebral Palsy Association of NSW.
Righto
Bloods05, Zoot & Jules
Zoot, whilst I am flattered to know you hang on my every reply, time does always permit me gifting you with my wit and wisdom.
I’m not running a blog that claims to be an impartial and purely intellectual arbiter of the media, whilst really doing little more than selectively seeking examples, no matter how tenuous at times, to boost a passionately held political view point and undermine another.
Andrew Bolt, whilst certainly guilty of the latter behaviour, doesn’t claim the sort of pure and grandiose motives that Dave and Jeremy do in the “about” spiel of this blog.
Though, I have noticed that the “about” spiel of Dave and Jeremy’s new enterprise is more upfront in their political biases whilst making none of the incongruously noble claims of Pure Poison.
Progress of a kind.
What is it with the Right and noble aspirations?
Andrew Bolt, whilst certainly guilty of the latter behaviour, doesn’t claim the sort of pure and grandiose motives that Dave and Jeremy do in the “about” spiel of this blog.
Oh, please. The whole point of this thread was that, being obviously the most one-eyed barracker on the Australian media landscape, Andrew Bolt doesn’t get to accuse others of being “unfair, unbalanced and savagely skewed to fit his ideological inclinations, sometimes to the point of melodrama” – at least not without people rolling on the floor laughing at him. Show us any evidence of Bolt acknowledging his bias. If he’s calling someone else biased, I think it’s fairly safe to assume he thinks he’s not. In any case, he has previously claimed to be a “centrist” at his blog. What a joke.