In Victoria, Australia, more than 200 people are dead. More are
missing. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed and entire towns wiped
off the map. The devastation to the Australian people is
palpable. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd captured it in his
parliamentary speech today, first quoting from Australia's national
poem "My Country" by Dorothea Mackellar:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror-
The wide brown land for me.

"Her beauty and her terror," quoted Rudd, "Of this wide, brown land.
Except that the land is now black, the earth scorched and the people in
mourning."

Photo Courtesy Flickr/SplaTT

A beautiful, powerful sentiment. And yet, like a Hawaiian shirt at a
funeral, it was the inappropriately "colorful" news that turned heads
today. When I heard the story on KNX 1070 newsradio this morning about
a koala being rescued from the raging Australian wildfires, I couldn't help but
ask my car speakers, "are you kidding me?!"

At first, you might assume the survival story of "Sam the scorched koala" was a
heart-warming fragment capturing the enduring beauty of nature, even
amongst devastation. His poor little scorched paws. His wide, black
eyes. His yearning expression as his baby-like fingers reach for the
bottle of water being offered by a kind stranger.

"He turned around...and sort of looked at me with (a look) like, 'put me out of my misery'," firefighter David Tree told the AP.

It's gut-wrenching stuff. I agree. But not because I'm swooning over the
similarity of animal paws to human hands. I hate to burst the bubble of
cuteness, I just can't help but remember the surrounding context of
this "story." Put in its proper place, a fetish with "parched koalas"
seems more than a little distasteful. There is no excuse for dumbing
down human tragedy, even if you're a believer in the mythical concept
of "upbeat" news.

Yet I checked the news wire, and, yes, the AP is hurtling this story around for syndication. What's even more disorienting is that local news stations here in Los Angeles are picking it up.

The fires, which have been rampaging across the southern state of Victoria for more than a month, have been described as "a fireball that came over the hills and devoured everything." A police team of 100 are searching for arsonists, and even the Queen of England is in shock about the swelling death toll.

Running with a koala story is offensive news judgment. It's offensive because
it undermines and belittles the tragedy that is occurring in Australia
right now. Why focus on a single animal and humanize it, when
you're going to throw out the human death toll as an abstract
figure? It seems unfair and manipulative, as if this koala
is being used to stir up empathy that otherwise wouldn't exist. I'd
like to think that audiences would feel as much, if not more, for their
fellow species as they would for a fluffy animal.

At first I thought that it might just be a media ploy to entice US audiences into foreign territory. But confusingly, Australia is doing it too.
Koalas are climbing into the headlines.  And then I realized how
quickly a plague can spread when the South African Independent Online
ran with, "Parched Koalas Win Hearts Worldwide." You would think that it would be easier to find a homo sapien fire-survivor than a koala who can drink water out of a bottle.

I guess I'm wrong.

Did I mention that more than 200 people - not animals - are dead? One
man siphoned off the water from his car radiator to save the life of a
neighbour who'd been set alight, according to the BBC. KNX did air a sound bite from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but
rather than put a damper on their listeners with the "black, scorched
land" image, they used Rudd to explain what a fire is: "Fire holds a
great terror for us all," said Rudd. "Its power, its speed, its raw and
relentless destruction."