Update: The first 1600 words of Anne Summers' profile of Andrew Bolt is now published online (subscription required to read the entire piece, at 6700 words).

Update: 'Bolt an opportunist keen on Fox News, says writer' - Karl Quinn, the Age, October 5

The recent Federal Court finding against Andrew Bolt condemns the News Ltd columnist in no uncertain terms: it notes that his offending columns in 2009 (which had breached the Racial Discrimination Act) contained “untruthful facts” and “distortion of the truth”, and that Bolt’s conduct “lacked objective good faith”.
 
So how did the son of Dutch migrants and the boy from outback SA – who a former fiancée remembers as “introverted, restless, romantic”, with strong ethics and an opposition to sensationalist journalism – end up this way?
 
Anne Summers (‘The Bolt Factor’, October) may have some answers: Is it simply that he has aged and “settled down at the Little House on the Prairie”? Or is it a pragmatic manipulation of the fact that “to succeed in today’s media you need to create controversy”? According to one colleague, “[Bolt] saw the political power that comes from right-wing ranting, and he appointed himself to do it.”
 
The Monthly’s October issue will be on the shelves on 7 October …

Anne Summers is a Walkley Award–winning journalist. She was formerly the Canberra bureau chief for the Australian Financial Review, a reporter for the National Times, correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and Le Monde, editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine, editor of Good Weekend. She was a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Courier Mail, and contributes to the Age and the Sunday Age.