Fake News Alert: Fairfax Headline Implies Andrew Bolt Threw The First Punch
The attempted assault on Andrew Bolt has been reported through first hand accounts here on The Unshackled, Catallaxy Files, Quadrant Online and through Andrew Bolt’s own media on his blog and Sky News television show. It has been reported now by other media organizations but there is one in particular who did its best to misrepresent what actually took place. It was of course Fairfax Media which ran with the headline ”Andrew Bolt throws punches after being sprayed with sticky liquid with glitter”. This headline would appear to imply that it was Andrew Bolt who threw the first punch and all the attackers did was spray him liquid and glitter, like he had some sort of violent outburst after some protestors wanted to make a statement.
The article puts the word alleged in front of everything the attackers did to Andrew Bolt. Fairfax would of course claim this is for legal reasons, but anyone who had seen the CCTV footage would know, and people like me who were present at the event that these leftist thugs viciously set up him and he did well to fend them off. Fairfax also seemed to doubt that the attackers were leftist thugs stating ‘on his program, Bolt described his attackers as “left-wing fascists”, though this has not been confirmed by police”. Well who else would have been? Some right wing extremists upset that Andrew is not conservative enough?
The article does its best to downplay the physical threat to Bolt but it is of course its headline which is of major concern. Fairfax should know better than to put such a misleading headline on a news story. This is the same media organization who were successfully sued by former Treasurer and now US Ambassador Joe Hockey for their misleading headline ‘Treasurer for sale’. The court ruled against them not because of what was in the article itself but because headline implied Hockey was corrupt.
With this headline about Andrew Bolt it would be fair to assume that if a person did not read the entirety of the article they might draw a false conclusion. Though this type of behavior shouldn’t surprise us from Fairfax but one would hope a news organization would not stretch the truth in a story about somebody they don’t like.
