The rise of blogging, mainstream media, and Victoria’s river red gum forests

Recently on ABC TV’s Lateline program, it was inferred that social and political web blogs should not be taken too seriously as they are little more than a forum for the chronically disaffected. The observation that there are many correspondents to online blogs who will readily respond with apparent authority to virtually any topic, perhaps lends some credence to this perception.

However, there are many bloggers who participate in online discussions on topics about which they have a particular expertise which deserves to be taken very seriously. It is the extent to which these correspondents are resorting to online blogs that raises questions about the capability and willingness of the mainstream media to give oxygen to the full range of expert opinion and to report objectively on current affairs free from their own bias and spin.

An all-too familiar example of this media failure was aired on ABC TV’s Stateline program recently in a woefully inadequate and biased coverage of the ongoing community debate over the management of Victoria’s Murray River red gum forests (Testing the government - a new plan to save Victoria’s red gums, August 1, 2008).

Rural Australia has been increasingly angered by city-centric land use policies over the past decade. Under the guise of improved environmental outcomes which are rarely realised, state governments have gained tremendous political mileage among “green” inner-urban electorates by implementing a massive program of national park expansion with scant regard for the socio-economic implications for rural and regional communities. The city-based media’s mostly simplistic and unbalanced treatment of rural socio-environmental issues has played a key role in generating the popular support for these policies that has ensured their political success.

The debate over Victoria’s river red gum forests is somewhat different to the many forestry debates that have preceded it. This is because all parties agree that these forests are in real trouble and that something must be done. Their rapidly declining health follows a decade of severe drought which has magnified the already entrenched stress caused by river regulation which, since the 1930’s, has completely modified the natural flood regime to which they are adapted.

There is widespread agreement on the need for more water and better water management to artificially replicate the flood events needed to restore forest health and stimulate regeneration. Beyond that, the debate takes a familiar course with environmental activists campaigning to turn all the forests into national parks, while local communities prefer multiple-use forest management under a mix of parks, reserves and state forests. An important point is that re-badging all the forest as national park will do nothing to improve environmental outcomes which are only achievable through major water reform.

In 2004, following several years of co-ordinated environmental activism, the Victorian government instructed its environmental assessment agency, VEAC, to investigate the management of the Victorian red gum forests and make recommendations for the future. This was greeted with scepticism by those communities in close proximity to the forest because VEAC investigations have invariably been commissioned in response to environmental activism and have always resulted in substantial national park expansion.

The suspicion that VEAC would work to a pre-ordained outcome of more national parks has been progressively confirmed as local concerns raised during the public consultation phases of the investigation have been neglected or studiously ignored. Unsurprisingly, VEAC’s Draft Proposals Paper, released in July 2007, recommended a tripling of the area of national parks, the virtual exclusion of commercial forest uses, and a substantial reduction in opportunities for traditional recreational activities. In addition, VEAC proposed that some new national parks be managed by Boards of Management controlled by local indigenous representatives - a move widely viewed as compensation for the Yorta Yorta whose claim for Native Title over the Barmah Forest was defeated in the High Court in the mid-1990s.

In response to VEAC’s Draft Proposals, incensed local communities have been mobilised in unilateral opposition to an extent that is unprecedented in the history of rural public land policy determinations in Victoria, and possibly Australia.

Since October 2007, 25 community groups have come together to form the Rivers and Red Gum Environment Alliance. The Alliance represents over 100,000 people and includes four municipal councils backed by the Municipal Association of Victoria, six community and environmental groups, nine recreational user groups, five commercial user groups. It also includes the Bangerang People who harbour a strong claim to the traditional custodianship of much of the country in question and are opposed to the VEAC proposal to give control of national parks to the indigenous community.

After considerable effort and expense, the Alliance produced a highly professional 150-page Conservation and Community plan which challenges VEAC’s underlying rationale and scientific veracity, and proposes a far more balanced strategy for managing the forests that would address actual environmental problems with the support of the local community. This visionary plan was formally launched at Parliament House on July 31, 2008, and has been presented to Premier John Brumby as well as key politicians of all persuasions. Copies were also provided to media contacts prior to its formal launch.

The significance of the Alliance and its unique and determined challenge to government policy proposals has been widely recognised by the rural media including the Weekly Times and ABC regional radio who have provided considerable exposure to the issue. This presumably sparked the interest of the city-based ABC Stateline program which focuses largely on Victorian political issues.

Before the launch at Parliament House a Stateline reporter and a film crew attended a meeting of the Alliance’s Management Committee at Seymour where they shot several minutes of footage. The reporter was also provided with an advance copy of the Alliance’s alternative plan and was informed that it would be formally launched at Parliament House in two days time. She also spent several hours with each of three members of the Alliance’s Management Committee and conducted filmed interviews with them in or adjacent to the forest.

Stateline’s story on Victoria’s red gum issue was aired a day after the Parliament House launch of the Alliance’s plan. Despite the reporter’s obvious awareness of the Rivers and Red Gum Environment Alliance and its significance, it did not get a mention in the Stateline story. The reporter’s only concession to the strength of organised local opposition to VEAC’s proposals was a passing reference that ”… farmers, shooters, and the timber industry have formed an alliance in an effort to convince the government that the changes would destroy their communities”.

This of course, does no justice to the strength and professionalism of those opposed to the VEAC proposals. By referring to just a select few of its component groups whilst studiously ignoring the existence of a far broader formal Alliance which has prepared an alternative plan that is currently being considered by Victoria’s politicians, Stateline has deliberately denied its viewers an accurate picture of the state of the debate. Why?

Stateline’s interviews with several farmers and a sawmill owner who stand to be substantially disadvantaged if the Victorian government accepts VEAC’s proposals, also deserves some comment. The program’s deliberate focus on timber production and grazing which occur within just a 15-20 per cent portion of the forests, suggests a determination to portray all opponents of the VEAC proposals as stereotypical “enemies of the environment”. After all, to the “pro-green” inner urban elite there are probably no more abhorrent groups than shooters and loggers (terms that were frequently used throughout the story), with many also regarding farmers as having questionable environmental credentials. If Stateline had pointed out the full range of groups opposed to VEAC’s proposals, its viewers would have gained a far different impression.

The treatment of this and past forestry issues by ABC TV current affairs programs such as Four Corners has always had a common thread. That is, that all opponents of environmental activism are portrayed as financially self-interested and therefore not to be trusted. This cynical approach to investigative journalism was perfectly encapsulated by veteran reporter Charles Woolley when, in 2004, he related the story of an editorial mentor who early in his career advised him to always listen to what interviewees said when researching investigative stories, but to then take note of who pays them.

While such an approach may in some instances help to expose activities that are not in the public interest, its pre-conceived presumption of wrong-doing will at other times result in unfair vilification of what are in fact legitimate and sensible activities. From the viewpoint of public interest, the most disturbing aspect of this approach is that it routinely dismisses the thoughts of those who know the most by working daily within and around the issues, in lieu of the opinions of people who - while undoubtedly independent in a pecuniary sense - are mostly merely arms-length observers who are so remote as to make them least qualified to influence policy outcomes.

It is obvious that self-interest drives any debate. However, self-interest embraces a wide spectrum of concerns. Among the members of Rivers and Red Gum Environment Alliance, self-interest is based around financial, philosophical, scientific, practical, professional, as well as recreational and lifestyle concerns. Against this, the overwhelming nature of self-interest among supporters of national park expansion is ideologically-based on little or no practical experience of the forest. Yet it is this remote, simplistic, and largely uninformed self-interest that is routinely favoured in the coverage of rural socio-environmental issues by the city-based media.

Misrepresenting the self-interest of those opposing national park expansion as being always bad and untrustworthy is a tactic that will no doubt continue to be used by journalists pushing personal agendas ahead of their professional requirement for objectivity. Where this leads to more national parks it will be mostly welcomed by those living in the far away suburbs of major cities whose knowledge of the issues is generally very limited.

However, these decisions are often tragic for those residing in rural communities where lifestyle, income, and employment are related to traditional forest uses that have been permitted for generations. From the viewpoint of these communities, there is understandable bewilderment and anger at the upheaval to their lives caused by unnecessary decisions made at the behest of an elite minority that will do little more than appease a popular sentiment generated largely through the failure of the city media to treat rural issues objectively.

There is currently considerable dismay among the members of the Rivers and Red Environment Alliance because eight months and thousands of hours of voluntary effort and expenditure (with a combined notional value of at least $500,000), may have been derailed on the whim of one, apparently agenda-driven, journalist who has refused to give them a fair go.

Unfortunately there is little they can do now that the story has been screened and viewer opinions have been shaped. Complaining to a media tribunal may eventually provide the satisfaction of a retraction but, as occurs so often, the program’s deception would be difficult to prove as it was achieved more by omitting relevant information rather than airing statements which can be proven wrong. In any case, it can take years for media complaints to be resolved as mountaineer Tim McCartney-Snape found after only recently winning a defamation case stemming from a 1995 Four Corners program that no one remembers.

Online blogs play an important role in providing a forum for those misrepresented by the mainstream media that at least enables their case to put on the public record.