Such fun with semantics from News Corp, fruity policy on the run in Queensland, and how to win friends and influence student politics.
Good feud guide redux News Corp Australia has responded to Malcolm Turnbull’s Monday night evisceration of The Australian‘s Paul Kelly on Q+A by playing with semantics. In a statement, it has rebutted Turnbull’s assertion: “Your newspapers were saying [the catastrophic 2019 bushfires were] all the consequence of some arsonists.”
This unsubstantiated statement is blatantly untrue. The facts demonstrate starkly the falsity of Mr Turnbull’s claim.
During the bushfires period, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser published 3335 stories about the bushfires between September 1 last year and January 23. Only 3.4% mentioned ‘arson’ or ‘arsonists’. In this same period, news.com.au also published more than 300 bushfire stories, of which only 16 mentioned arson, equivalent to 5%. Not one of these small number of stories stated the bushfires were ‘all the consequence’ of arsonists.
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