Tonight I find myself defending right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt and Minister for Cocktail Parties Alexander Downer over The Red Cross Ambulance Incident. What are they putting in the water?
In Crikey today, Sophie Vorrath whinges that Bolt relied on anonymous blogger Zombietime to bebunk the “Israel hits ambulances with missile” story as a hoax — just like I did on the weekend.
Apparently it’s OK for Bolt to rely on an unattributed blog called Zombietime to back his sensational claim – the same source, it seems, upon which the Honourable Alexander Downer based his concern about “evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon†during his speech to the National Newspaper Publishers’ Conference on the Gold Coast on Monday.
The website… claims to prove that the 23 July attack, in which two ambulances were fired upon and six people injured, never happened, using photographs of an interior of one ambulance that apparently show there was not enough damage.
Here’s how I’ve replied to Crikey, which I daresay will be published tomorrow:
Stilgherrian writes: Sophie Vorrath is way keen to attack Andrew Bolt — hey the gods know there’s plenty of reasons you’d want to. But Vorrath misrepresents Zombietime as “claiming to prove” the Israel-shoots-ambulance tale a fake “using photographs of an interior of one ambulance”. Zombietime actually presents a detailed forensic argument over 9000 words — starting with the supposed “missile hole” sitting right where other ambulances have a ventilator. Zombietime’s story certainly fits the facts better than any claim of “missile attack”. Why have a go at Bolt (or Alexander Downer) just because we don’t know who the messenger is?