Andrew Bolt and Terry McCrann have every right to be furious with Rupert Murdoch for leaving them in the invidious position of having to choose between looking like jelly-backed hypocrites or toeing the new company line on climate change as out-lined in The Sun this week.

Based on today’s vicious attack on Al Gore, Andrew Bolt is showing no early signs of surrendering his post as the pre-eminent pro-pollution propagandist in the world’s worst polluting country.

I hope Bolt and McCrann hold the line and become proud rebels against Rupert’s unhealthy culture of journalistic sycophancy. Maybe they’ll become emboldened and we’ll see Bolt rip into America’s Iraq folly and McCrann unload on Rupert’s disgraceful corporate governance record.

The two of them, who have notched up almost 40 years of loyal service to Rupert, were both at the recent News Corp management love-in in San Francisco where Al Gore appears to have won Rupert over to taking climate change seriously.

Bolt took Gore on at the meeting in what became a shouting match but has so far refused to disclose exactly what happened. He misleads his readers today by claiming “I was banned by Gore’s publicists from interviewing him, not being sufficiently reverential in the ABC way”.

Gore’s people clearly decided Bolt was an irrational bully who’d already had his turn at the News Corp love-in. Why does such detail have to remain secret media company business? The Herald Sun was apparently offered an interview, but the paper insisted it had to be Bolt – at which point it sacrificed any opportunity for a sit-down interview with Gore given Bolt’s behaviour in San Francisco.

Bolt’s bullying clearly has few boundaries. A search of “Andrew Bolt and The Age” in the Herald Sun data base turns up 212 mentions since 1996.

Despite running an hysterical campaign against the paper, Bolt had the cheek to demand space on the opinion page to respond to Robert Manne’s latest contribution in their Stolen Generation war. Opinion editor Ray Cassin and letters editor David Bernstein both declined on the basis that Bolt has ample ability to respond through his own multi-media soap boxes.

Lo and behold, Age editor Andrew Jaspan walked out at 6.30pm on Monday night and over-ruled them both, ordering that the letters page be re-drawn to accommodate Bolt. Manne has hit back again today in the letters page, but Jaspan clearly wilted in the face of one of those classic Bolt demands for a right of reply. Not a good move for morale at The Age.