COMM 337: OK, let's forget about the election and the economic crisis for a minute or two and look at a tried-and-true feature story

How can you not like this? A dog rescues a litter of kittens from a fire in Australia, and the news goes 'round the world. I just searched on "dog," "kittens" and "Australia," and I got 270 hits.

I first saw the raw video when I was tracking the latest meltdown in world financial markets on BBC News ... and a fuller report in The Herald Sun, a tabloid newspaper in Melbourne owned by Rupert Murdoch. The story is local, and the Herald Sun milks it for all it's worth. The head:

Lion-hearted Leo has courage licked

We'll look at the Reuters video that's linked to the page, so you can see where the pun comes from.

And the lede, which lays on the 'literation:

A TENACIOUS terrier dubbed Leo the Lion-hearted is being lauded for staying loyally by the side of four helpless kittens trapped in a burning house.

The gutsy bitzer had to be resuscitated by firefighters after refusing to abandon the kittens even as thick smoke and flames filled a Seddon weatherboard home on Saturday night.

Don't know what a bitzer is? Google it -- uh, perform a keyword search in the Google search engine -- and keep trying. Hint: If you don't find it at first, why don't you guess it's Australian slang and add that to your keyword search?