Plus: the Press Council makes a silk purse out of a sow’s ear of an Oz story, and Alan Jones just makes an ass of himself.
PC gone mad The Australian proudly reported this morning that the Press Council had found its notorious “Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183” headline was, apparently, “accurate and not misleading”.
The report had spread through the mainstream media and was leapt on by such alt-right figures as Donald Trump Jr, neatly shifting the discussion away from the possibility that climate change had played a role in fuelling out-of-control infernos.
As the Oz’s own take concedes, the opening paragraph had to be updated to make clear that the time period was since the beginning of 2019 (not “in the past few months” and “since the start of the bushfire season”). In the case of Victoria, the data concerning stats had nothing to do with the then-current bushfire season.
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