The Herald Sun’s resident rural reporter, Andrew Bolt, displayed how seriously he takes regional media today when he relayed Peter Costello’s column damning John Howard to his readers.

The link that accompanied Bolta’s extract wasn’t to here:

The Age Masthead

or to here:

SMH Masthead

but to the Bendigo Advertiser, one of Fairfax’s many regional newspapers.

The cynical amongst you might think that Andrew is trying to avoid linking to the SMH or Age to deny them hits or google page-rank importance. Churlish observers might accuse Andrew of finding a source for the Costello article that doesn’t have a comments section which may divert his readers.

I, however, suspect that Andrew always starts his day with the Bendigo Advertiser, the Border Mail, the Wagga Daily Advertiser, the Mudgee Guardian and of course the Dubbo Daily Liberal, in preference to the elitist broadsheets in our metropolitan centres, it’s what a man of the people like Andrew would do. Besides which, any conspiracy theories around Andrew’s linking behaviour can be pretty easily ignored due to the fact that we’ve seen time and again that his readers don’t click through to read the source material anyway.