Andrew Bolt: No criminal act but media quick to crucify Andrew Laming

It’s true that Liberal MP Andrew Laming did something stupid, but he has been framed by the ABC and other journalists of the Left.

Don’t call them journalists. Call these people persecutors instead, quick to crucify another man.

Look, for instance, at what they did to federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming.

I agree, Laming is hard to defend. He’d already been accused of bullying two women online.

But the last straw for him was being branded an upskirting sex creep, which panicked Prime Minister Scott Morrison into forcing Laming to announce he’d quit parliament.

Laming was framed by the ABC and other journalists of the Left.

It is true he did something very stupid at best and nasty and demeaning at worst. He’d seen a young woman in a shop bending over to try to fill a fridge and photographed her — bottom stuck out and underwear riding up.

Good on her male colleagues for making him delete the picture.

Laming claims it was all innocent. He’d been photographing workers trying to do impossible jobs.

Believe him or not. But one thing Laming certainly did not do was what journalists of the Left then accused him of doing.

One thing Andrew Laming certainly did not do was what journalists of the Left then accused him of doing. Picture: AAP

“Laming took a photograph up a woman’s skirt,” declared Channel 10’s Tegan George.

Laming “defends upskirting picture as ‘dignified’,” mocked The New Daily.

SBS also claimed Laming was accused of “upskirting” and The Saturday Paper warned “upskirting is a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison”.

The ABC’s Louise Milligan joined this smearing. Predictably, because she’s the manic crusader who falsely painted Cardinal George Pell as a paedophile, and then broke the story that federal minister Christian Porter was accused of rape, without reporting parts of the claim by his now-dead accuser that showed how improbable and disturbed her complaint was.

Milligan again assumed the very worst, tweeting of Laming that it was not just “grossly offensive” but a crime to take “a photo of a woman’s underwear under her skirt without consent”.

But one of the men who’d confronted Laming has confirmed what Laming says: there was no upskirting.

Sean Blinco explained: “The photo showed Crystal bending over and her underwear exposed over the top of her shorts that she was wearing.”

Still creepy, you’d rightly say — if you reject Laming’s excuses.

But not upskirting. And not a crime, which is a critical difference.

So why did so much of the media not care or not correct the record?

Are they journalists, or persecutors?