Biased, lacking accuracy, fairness and balance is how commentator Andrew Bolt describes media reports regarding the recent civil claim against Cardinal George Pell and the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
Bolt, a self-confessed agnostic, also labels reports as “anti-Catholic” and a “witch hunt.”
In his Thursday piece to air on The Bolt Report, Bolt accuses the ABC of misleading people not just by what it reports but, more importantly, by what it leaves out.
Bolt says both the ABC and The Age organisations have ignored the facts of the events, and he is asking why.
Criminal convictions against Pell for abusing two teenage choirboys in December 1996 when he was the Archbishop of Melbourne were singly and jointly quashed by a bench of seven High Court judges in 2020.
Speaking to Australia, Bolt said it was the Victorian Police who told the father his son was raped by Pell.
Sue the Victorian Police, not George Pell nor the Archdiocese of Melbourne, says the media commentator.
“This man is suing Pell, who is innocent, for not foreseeing the shock this father would feel when police told him about a rape of his son.
“That ‘spoiler alert’ never actually happened said Bolt.
“So sue the police instead.
“They’re the ones who wrongly charged Pell after a farce of an investigation.
“They’re the ones who so shocked this man by telling him his son had been raped when the evidence shows he was not.”
Bolt says the ABC, in particular, should be so, so careful with this story, so sceptical, so determined to be fair to George Pell.
The ABC has been “absolutely disgusting,” said Bolt.
“It (the ABC) should be embarrassed. It should be mortified. It should be looking to make amends.”
Bolt accuses the ABC of getting its reporting mixed up and of an “evil and baseless witch hunt (that) put Pell in jail for 404 days for crimes he could not possibly have committed”.
“They falsely painted him as a paedophile, and in a manic witch hunt led by reporters like Louise Milligan who even wrote a book and recorded a podcast and filed TV stories, all defaming Pell, all pushing these fake claims.”
Accusing the ABC of a “get Pell feeding frenzy”, Bolt says even when Pell was found not guilty, the ABC never apologised and it has never explained why so many ABC reporters instead treated Pell as guilty from the start.
Even in its most recent (civil claim) report, Bolt says that for some reason the ABC omitted that the son of the man suing Pell and the Archdiocese of Melbourne never made the allegation that Pell raped or sexually assaulted his son. It also omitted to report that the son told his mother, more than once that there was no sexual assault.