Fire? What Fire?

I am quite deliberately trying to counter the impression that the media has created in its reporting on the Blue Mountains fires. Whether they choose to accept responsibility for it or not, readers, viewers and listeners across the country and the globe are left with the impression that the 79,000 residents of the Blue Mountains are either dead or evacuated, their towns and villages reduced to ashes and the iconic scenery of the district despatched to a nostalgic memory.

There comes a point where selecting key portions of the truth to fashion a marketable story becomes a distortion of the truth. Ongoing failure to place a story into context transforms the distortion into an outright lie. Pretty soon that outright lie creates a new story - one in which the micro economy of a district fails because its primary industry (i.e. tourism) disappears along with the businesses which comprise it and the families which depend upon it.

The media, its journalists and its proprietors do not have the right to sell a community down the river for the sake of a good story and yet that is what is being done. Right now a lot of people are getting pretty angry with the way their district is being exploited. I am one of them. The good people who lost their homes in the first 36 hours of this crisis - in particular - deserve better. So do the brave firies, many of whom are local people who may ultimately live to suffer the consequences.

The iconic product of the Blue Mountains is its Jamison Valley and this is TODAY's picture. Notice something? No fire. No charred trees. No soot. No flames. No smoke and NO long trails of homeless Blue Mountains refugees. That'd be a big disappointment to the media.