Andrew Bolt takes a spanking

Australia's most shamelessly mercenary reporter, Melbourne Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt, was thoroughly and finally spanked recently. Bolt tends to respond to all criticism with a stream of abuse followed by a series of threats. Indeed he is known by independent online news source Crikey as Australia's most litigious journalist.

Recently Bolt noticed Senetor Mackay refer to him in the context of a senate comittee as "far-right" and proceeded as follows: he wrote to Mackay saying he was hurt by her remarks and disagreed with them, she ignored him (thinking he was having a bad day), he wrote again and included the following lines:

Before I write about you, I felt it only fair — given my preference for checking before criticising — to give you another opportunity to do the right thing.

This is of course no surprise, Andrew Bolt threatening someone with abuse from his position in the media if they do not obey him, and yet it is exceptional.

Mackay picked up on this and refered the matter to the Clerk of the Senate. As she had suspected the Clerk informed her that in his opinion Bolt's ...statement appears to be an attempt to press you to change your parliamentary remarks by the threat of an article critical of you and that this would constitute contempt of the Parliamentary Priveleges Act. Basically a democratically elected institution such as the Senate - like a jury - is meant to be protected from interference by means of threats and the like - it is one thing to criticize a politician but a very different thing to threaten them with mass media criticism unless a list of demands is met. (see Hansard p. 37 - 39)

Given the legal situation, whether Bolt responds and what he says will be very interesting.

Related Link