I'm Bob Garfield, and this is an OTPM podcast extra.

Australia's deadly wildfires have been burning since September,

and they're expected to go on for weeks, if not months.

More than 25 million acres have burned.

That's roughly the size of West Virginia.

And as of this recording, 28 people have died. An estimated 1 billion animals have

perished, and it may be that entire species have been doomed. Hundreds of thousands of people

have been forced to evacuate, and roughly 2,000 homes have been destroyed. There have been

months of drought and record-breaking temperatures, and summer is

not close to being over. Under blood-red skies and choking smoke, an apocalyptic scene of

never-ending fire. This is the largest peacetime evacuation in the country's history.

But there's another damaging plague that's been spreading quickly across Australia.

Conservative media outlets, many owned by Rupert Murdoch, have been misrepresenting the cause of

the fires and fiercely attacking those who blame the main culprit, climate change, in creating

conditions for the inferno. Damien Cave is the New York Times Bureau chief in Sydney, and he recently wrote about

Australia's bushfire disinformation campaign.

He spoke to us from Gundagai, Australia, about four hours or so southwest of Sydney.

And as he's been reporting, some towns that have already

been burned are actually facing the threat of more blazes. You see houses burned to the ground right

next to houses that are fine. You know, you see fields completely blackened, they run right up to the

door of a house, and for some reason the fire stopped there. So for a lot of people, I think it feels kind of arbitrary, and they feel like the fire is just

coming for them, and it's not finished until the fires are really out.

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