Herald-Sun Issues Apology For Bolt’s Wildly Wrong George Pell Piece

Pedestrian TV
July 4, 2017

https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/arts-and-culture/herald-sun-issues-apology-for-bolts-wildly-wrong-g/0602efc0-5716-4fa2-817b-6f56c3803731.htm

We all knew that Andrew Bolt's inevitable column about the sexual abuse charges against Cardinal George Pell was going to be a doozy, but we didn't expect that he was going to fuck up basic details so, so hard.

The Herald Sun today has issued an apology for Bolt's column in defence of Pell yesterday, in which he made... a big doozy of an error. Bolt attributed comments to Victoria Police Detective-Sergeant Kevin Carson which were actually said by abuse survivor Andrew Collins.

The comments in question – "the world will be watching this" and that the decision would be an "important step along the way" – were attributed by Bolt to the detective-sergeant as a way of arguing that institutional forces were already biased against Pell and that the entire trial was automatically fishy.

That argument kinda loses weight when they were actually said by a sexual abuse survivor and not a member of the police force. In fact, as the apology outlines, Carson explicitly has said that he will not comment on the trial as he does not want to jeopardise it or any future trial.

Memo to Bolt: if you're going to wage a deadshit culture war, at least get your basic facts right.