{"id":9989,"date":"2020-01-09T03:54:16","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T03:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialpanic.org\/?p=9989"},"modified":"2020-01-16T02:58:19","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T02:58:19","slug":"journalism-a-realistic-portrayal-of-the-australian-wildfires-scope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/2020\/01\/09\/journalism-a-realistic-portrayal-of-the-australian-wildfires-scope\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism: A realistic portrayal of the Australian wildfires scope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, ABC News put out this appalling (and wrong!) graphic implying that one-third of Australia was on fire.<\/p>\n

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This was later corrected to this graphic which still overstates the land area that has burned (each dot is generally larger than the underlying fire):<\/p>\n

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23,000 square miles have burned, which is a lot of land. The San Francisco Chronicle, fortunately, has created several graphics with Google Maps that properly illustrate the size of the area burned – its a catastrophe but its a LOT less than implied by most media images.<\/p>\n

Here’s a thumbnail view but click the link below for fullsize versions of this and other map overlays.<\/p>\n

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This is how news ought to be, providing information in a way that is accurate and easy to understand. Good job by SF Gate.<\/p>\n

Source: Three times the size of the Bay Area: The scale of Australia’s bushfires – SFGate<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

January 20, 2020. 36,978 sq files have burned, corresponding to 1.3% of Australia’s land mass<\/p>\n

Update:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

January 10, 2020. 32,400 square miles have burned, corresponding to 1.1% of Australia’s land mass.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 1974-1975 15% of Australia’s entire land mass was burned in wildfires<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Historical context matters, but the media is a context-free, usually fact-free and logic-free zone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The graphic shows the equivalent square miles to the acreage burned in Australian wildfires. Its a huge mess of fires but this provides tremendous context to the scope. ABC (US) News ran a graphic implying that about one third of Australia was on fire \ud83d\ude42 The accurate portrayal, in this Google Map, was created by the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/p>\n

Update January 10, 2020: 1.1% of Australia’s land mass has burned, 98.9% has not yet burned. This compares to 15% of Australia’s total land mass burning in the summer of 1974-1975.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,39,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-fake-news","category-fictional-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}