After quite a delay, the Good Weekend cover story on Andrew Bolt will finally be distributed in more than 500,000 Fairfax broadsheet papers.
Writer John van Tiggelen initially had good access to Bolt, which might have been because they share a Dutch heritage. Two days after they had dined together last month, Bolt used his blog to send van Tiggelen a curious message.
The chap featured, Robert Long, is a Dutch cabaret singer who’d come up in conversation. The title, Flink zijn, translates as “Be Brave”. A message? Was he urging himself to be brave in the face of the coming Bromberg judgment? Or urging van Tiggelen to be brave in the face of Fairfax’s perceived animosity towards him?
Or does he just like schmaltzy music?
Alas, Bolt was furious after The Age ran this piece by Sue Walshe, Bolt’s former fiancee who he lived with for six years in the early 1980s. He responded by cutting off van Tiggelen and pulling out of an agreed photo shoot with Good Weekend.
As back-up, Good Weekend had lined up a series of portraits shot for a previous barely seen profile, by ex-Liberal flack Tony Barry, for the Institute of Public Affairs. But the IPA is run by Bolt’s great friend John Roskam, and he was prevailed upon to veto the sale of these photos.
The IPA, of course, is a free market think tank which rounded up all those signatures for those full-page ads in The Australian defending Andrew Bolt’s right to get it wrong about so-called light-skinned Aborigines. Freedom of expression and freedom of markets would normally support the idea of the IPA making some money in the market from the commercial sale of an asset, portraits of Andrew Bolt, which it owned.
But there appears to be certain censorship and restrictions on such freedoms which Roskam may care to explain one day.
Meanwhile, John Hartigan’s appearance at the media inquiry yesterday once against demonstrated those amazing News Corp powers of denial. You know, like denying Fox News is partisan with that slogan “fair and balanced”.
Bolt’s powers of denial about his former fiancee were certainly something to behold. He could have simply said: “Yeah, we were engaged, kinda, but we were young.” Instead, he goes all out against Anne Summers, The Monthly, Fairfax and everyone gets hurt: the girl, Summers, the wife, himself.
It was an unbelievable performance. So what will Bolt do on reading the Good Weekend profile?
You wouldn’t want to be the Herald Sun sub moderating Bolt’s blog this weekend …
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