Forget the High Court. Forget the Victorian County Court and Court of Appeal.
George Pell couldn’t be guilty of child sex crimes because conservative News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt has ventured to the scene of the crime and concluded that this rape “could not possibly have happened”.
In a sensationalist spread in the Herald Sun newspaper yesterday — under the online headline “I walked the route of the ‘victim’. It couldn’t have happened” — Bolt says the attack by Pell on two boys in 1996 in a space of five to six minutes when they snuck into the priest’s sacristy after mass could not have happened.
Bolt timed himself walking from the cathedral to the sacristy in St Patrick’s Cathedral and concluded his stroll had given him greater insight than 12 jurors, two courts, and dozens of legal experts had during the trial; he said walking from the cathedral to the scarcity took him five-and-a-half minutes.
“That’s the maths. And it adds up to this: this rape could not possibly have happened,” Bolt writes, assuming his 60-year-old frame walked at the same pace of two young teens breaking the rules. “Did Victoria’s most senior judges make a terrible mistake in their maths when they ruled against Pell last month?” he asks.
Bolt has been a vocal supporter of Pell throughout the trial, writing op-ed after op-ed advocating for his innocence and raising questions about the trial. Journalist Lucie Morris-Marr, whose book about the Pell case has just been published, broke the story for the Herald Sun and has written about how her relationship with the paper turned sour over Bolt’s attacks on her reports.
Bolt’s “investigation” was nestled neatly next to a second column, where the columnist turns his rage to 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, along with women and, well, anyone upset at Australia’s climate policy.
So an opinion writer walks around a cathedral and gives an opinion. Informed (as in a jury who heard actual evidence) opinion is what counts.
It’s of a piece with his climate denialism, along the lines of ‘I checked the other day and the temperature was bang on average for this time of year, so the climate couldn’t possibly be changing’. This sort of thing surely only appeals to those who already agree with him.
Well there’s 5 and a half minutes I won’t get back.
No one listens to this bloke – surely?
Rote large – “investigative journalism” as defined by Murdoch’s Limited News?
How good is “press freedom” editing your “right to know”?
Rupert Murdoch NewsCrap Typhoid Mary opinionists bed bug aka Andrew Bolt; you have to feel sorry for him, he is instructed by the establishment what to write and does it. Too frightened not to do so as he needs his job. Outside NewsCrap no sane person or organisation would employ him, he knows that. After all should he lose his job, he would become a Centrelink job snob, fruit picking is not for him. Too intellectually taxing.