Murdoch's mendacious myth-building on bushfires and arson.
While arguing at Wattsupwiththat I started to encounter a run of claims that 183 people had been arrested for arson in connection with the ongoing bushfires in Australia. They cited this article in Murdoch's Australian, with the headline "Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183". So I read the article.
The headline seems immediately misleading. The story actually says
"NSW police data shows that since November 8, 24 people have been arrested for deliberately starting bushfires, while 184 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences."
An earlier version had said
“183 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences since November 8", which seems to be where the headline 183 came from. But "charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences" is very different from being arrested for arson. Australia rightly has draconian laws on fire safety in hot weather, and many of these offences relate to home barbecues, dropping cigarette butts, or fireworks.
Quite a lot has now been written on this story. Ketan Joshi has an informative Twitter thread. Snopes refutes an Infowars version of the story. Sou at HotWhopper has a lot to say on the real causes of the bushfires, and on the widespread attempts to push the "it was arsonists" line.
There is another Twitter thread by Jason Wilson, in which he notes that the story was even pushed by Trump Jr.
The prompt for the articles was =68.ARDW2KAurOLMKiJg33J11HI6kuu4reVORDhDg5FMjUTj0kvkSSYKEHlOIrfwl4PQDyT7NJSOzfT55CaDbEbb7DdCyfK-Zs8zbBX0c_hklAmPrf5PIuOOatN2nguDW-bsfwIKded-dVzqIZm1I-yHqKySG-4QQOQTuATAV3cCr7KKOw1JhDYoChCidHLtfTQ2YlotQvQrxsbFe9tC2J4m2_QxqvBBd-zyP0mq6IvRc3V7-9-kwoHEiCiotrRYIGcs0v1qbVuLxCBgCIVBDVKgVTAnehoPH6PQzceCf96F7SlXtR0M-zphnQMlhqwkjw88INERkrWj6Il3lFb3&__tn__=-R]this statement by NSW Police. It says:
"Since Friday 8 November 2019, legal action – which ranges from cautions through to criminal charges – has been taken against 183 people – including 40 juveniles – for 205 bushfire-related offences.
Of note:
- 24 people have been charged over alleged deliberately-lit bushfires
- 53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban, and
- 47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land."
Note that the Australian text is already inflating. They have (later) boosted the 183 to 184, and counted the "arson" charges separately to the 183. But there is, or seems to be, a subtlety missed in the discussion. The headline now says "Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183"
. The word "national" has been added. The original version, as shown in the screenshot by Joshi and preserved in the URL, did not have it. And indeed, the article does list a number of allegations in other states, although they add to 172, not 183.
At this point, I note that a very similar story appeared in the Trump-supporting Epoch Times, headed "Police Take Legal Action Against More Than 180 in Australia for Alleged Bushfire-Related Offenses"
But from the URL, the original headline was the familiar "nearly-200-people-arrested-in-australia-for-deliberately-lighting-bushfires". They appended a correction:
"Correction: A previous version of this article, in the headline, incorrectly stated the actions police took against 183 people for alleged bushfire-related offenses in Australia. Police have taken legal action against them. The Epoch Times regrets the error."
They do acknowledge that the original headline misrepresented the NSW Police report.
Not so the Australian. They just changed the headline to switch the basis of the claim from NSW to national, even though the arithmetic doesn't add up. So I looked a little further.
The Oz said
"Queensland police say 101 people have been picked up for setting fires in the bush, 32 adults and 69 juveniles.
In Tasmania, where fires have sprung up in the north of the state and outside Hobart, four were caught setting fire to vegetation. Victoria reported 43 charged for 2019."
I can't find out much more about the Qld figure, which would have to be more than half the national claim. "Setting fires in the bush" is not necessarily arson; it could be campfires, BBQs, farmers burning off. But I did dig into the Victorian figure.
I found it is based on the Crime Statistics Agency data. The specific offences are under B12, in a table you can download here. There were 21 charges of "INTENTIONALLY CAUSE A BUSHFIRE", 21 of "RECKLESSLY CAUSE A BUSHFIRE", and one of "RECK SPREAD FIRE TO VEGETATION-PROP OTHR". Only the first charge seems to be properly described as arson. But there may be more than one of these charges per incident, or per person. So I looked up this table, which said that there were 32 incidents, not 43. I could not find the number of offenders; the tables don't seem to have that data.
Update:
I found more information about the Victorian data in this CSA table, which lists incidents, with action taken. For year to Sep 2019, there were 34 B12 incidents, for which:
1. 16 charges were laid
2. 7 no charges laid
3. 11. unsolved.
This seems inconsistent with the other table saying 43 charges were laid (which Murdoch used). It may be that a lot of those 43 were withdrawn.
But of course the key fact is that this CSA data relates to the previous whole year, Oct 2018-Sept 2019. There is no overlap with this season's fires, which in Victoria did not start until after September.
So there it is. The Australian tried to beat up a NSW police statement into a "nearly 200 arson arrests" story. When that wouldn't hold, they just tried to reframe it as a national total. But the data doesn't say that at all.
Update: I see that the NY Times has a new analysis of the role of the Murdoch press in dishonestly promoting the arson (and "greenies wouldn't allow hazard reduction burns") narratives, with a link to Timothy Graham's QUT analysis of the role of bots in promoting the story.
Update: There is another article in the Telegraph which covers a lot of the same ground, but clarifies the Qld matter:
"The claim 101 people in Queensland have been arrested for arson this summer has also been circulated.
However, Queensland police said the figure includes a broader range of fire offences, including breaching of total fire bans, and was not a total of arrests, but a total of “police enforcement actions”.
Queensland police told local media that of the total reported bushfires in the state between 10 September and 8 January, around 10 per cent are believed to have been deliberately lit."
The cover-up is also based on lies.
Update
I have plotted by year the number of "deliberately start bush fire" (code 411G) offences on Victoria for the last decade (doesn't include this year). There is no recent uptick, in fact the opposite.
Update
From the Melbourne Age:
""Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour," a police spokeswoman said.
The CFA incident controller in Bairnsdale, Brett Mitchell, backed up that statement on Thursday, saying that none of the recent fires in the East Gippsland area have been started by arson."
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