Andrew Bolt's Reality Meltdown

By Darryl Mason


Screengrab from The Australian online front page in the days following the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami

How many times can pro-nuclear wacko and alleged journalist Andrew Bolt show himself to be grotesquely ignorant, wrong and ill-informed in the space of just one week? Five times? Ten times? More?

Following the March 11 earthquake in Japan, a 15 metre high tsunami wave slammed into a nuclear plant in Fukushima. The earthquake and tsunami killed more than 28,000 people.

For obvious reasons there was widespread concern in Japan, and around the world, about how good a job the Japanese government and the nuclear plant's operators were doing in containing radiation leaking from the smashed plant.

As a sign of just how confident the US government was that the Japanese government could contain radiation from the Fukushima plant, they began preparations for the evacuation of thousands of US military families within hours of the US government learning just how huge and potentially deadly the unfolding disaster actually was.

And, not unexpectedly, news media leaped on the 'Nuclear Crisis' story and ran with it hard, voicing arguments both for and against nuclear power.

This gave Andrew Bolt the opportunity to blame The Greens for nuclear "scaremongering" and to attack "the media" (of which he is one of Australia's most prominent and highly paid) for their coverage.

Well, attack some media.

Attack, primarily, the main newspaper competition to the newspapers owned by ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch that publish Andrew Bolt's often incoherent and poorly researched swill.

Bolt began his ill-fated campaign to bludgeon his ideological and political enemies for "fear-mongering" over Fukushima on March 14 :

"...the offensive media fear-mongering..."

"...the media coverage of some papers obsesses instead about trouble at some nuclear reactors..."

This was the only time Bolt linked to Australian newspapers he claimed were over-hyping the radioactive threat posed by the rapidly failing Fukushima nuclear plant. He didn't link to anything published in the newspapers he writes for, of course, because that would have proven what a deceitful idiot he is.

The stories from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald Bolt did link to were, in fact, mild and quite low on undue hype and "fear-mongering", in stark contrast, that is, to the newspapers Andrew Bolt works for.






Here's the online front pages from the Bolt-publishing Daily Telegraph & Herald Sun the day before those Age & SMH stories were published.





Even more bizarrely, Andrew Bolt ran this headline on his blog...



....the day after his Herald Sun newspaper ran this front page :



Which proves Bolt doesn't even read the front pages of the main newspaper he writes for, because nowhere, in a week of blog postings, did he acknowledge it was the actually the Herald Sun shouting 'Meltdown'.

Here's more excerpts from Andrew Bolt's blogs & columns in the 10 days following the start of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, interspersed with online & print front pages from the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and other Murdoch news media, including The Australian, published during the same period.

Bolt neither linked to nor mentioned any of these in any of his columns or blog posts.

March 15 :

The great green scaremongering gets worse.

March 16 :

No, there won’t be a nuclear explosion, “China syndrome” or “another Chernobyl”. The situation today is better than yesterday, and as each day goes by the chances of a big accident lesson. The nuclear fuel remains contained.

This scaremongering over the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex is extraordinary.

Isn't it though?



March 18 :

We will need to make some people accountable for this monstrous scaremongering once the truth becomes undeniable

March 19 :

The fear of Fukushima is deadlier than the fallout

Utter madness. The journalists who have whipped this up should be ashamed of themselves.

These journalists?



March 20 :

The wild reporting of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear emergency continues, with lurid claims of radioactive plumes, poisoned milk and more. The fact remains, though, that no one has been killed and probably never will.

March 21 :

no one in the towns around the plant is in any danger whatsoever from the radiation.

...the screaming, braying, lying, hyperventilating, fabricating, panicking media coverage is probably likely to kill you first instead.

March 21 :

It’s time to hold the scaremongers to account.

These "scaremongers?"



Andrew Bolt, March 22 :

Why worry only about the reactor that has killed no one?

Yes, why worry about a mostly destroyed, exploding, radioactive water spewing nuclear plant when you can, if you read Murdoch news media, worry instead about whether or not Mother Nature is now purposely trying to kill humans?



Her cruelty, eh?

March 11 wasn't, you see, another one of the hundreds of mega-earthquakes and tsunamis that have rocked, smashed and swept across the fault-line islands we now call Japan in the past few dozen million years.....it was instead a Terror Attack on humans by 'cruel' Mother Nature, at least according to the Gold Coast Bulletin :



None of the above headlines or front pages were criticised, or even mentioned, by Andrew Bolt is his 10 day campaign to blame "fear-mongering" over the deadly serious, ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan on "the greens" and non-Murdoch news media.

Not one.

And since it has been confirmed that explosions at Fukushima did indeed claim lives, that vast farming areas of Japan are so polluted with radiation they can't grow essential crops like rice, perhaps for years, or decades, and that radioactive water gushing into the Pacific Ocean from the nuclear plant has destroyed lifeblood fishing industries and clouds of radiation have even reached milk and food supplies in the United States, what has Andrew Bolt said?

Nothing.

As soon as Andrew Bolt realised facts and reality had proven him wrong, deceitfully wrong, about Fukushima, over and over again, he simply dropped the story.

Completely.

Like a petulant child who, once told he is wrong, runs to his room and slams the door on the reality of his mistakes.

Bolt has said nothing, not even an update or a correction, about the true scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in weeks.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Fukushima disaster has been upgraded to a Level 7 nuclear emergency, the same rating as Chernobyl, the highest rating possible.

Quality journalism indeed.

There Is No Good Outcome For Fukushima Disaster

Your New Reality - Mother Nature : The Ultimate Terrorist



Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here


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