Time to investigate 'Green' media spin

Amongst a litany of lies and half truths scattered throughout the article, several stood out:

"Australia's ancient native forests were saved the ignominy of being incinerated for government-subsidised electricity..........."

"In 200 years Australia has cleared and logged much of its old growth and wild forests so it can only be misguided to burn the rest."

"Clearly, properly managed timber plantations are a renewable resource, but wood sourced from native forest logging is something else. It can take hundreds of years for these trees to grow to the size of 30-storey buildings, and a matter of minutes for them to burn"

"Similarly, the Victorian government is trying to lock in 20-year supply contracts for native forest ''waste''.To aid this it is planning to exempt logging from the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act so the habitat of the remaining 1000 or so Leadbeater's possums in the Central Highlands can be logged"

"The government will risk the extinction of threatened species and what little is left of its old-growth forest to keep the industry going"

Yet the bioenergy proposal was to simply use waste from already existing native forest timber harvesting and processing operations. There has never been any suggestion of changing legislation to allow harvesting to expand into the millions of hectares of national parks, reserves, and off-limits management zones where most of our forests (and virtually all our old growth forests) now reside. It is also ludicrous to suggest that plantation trees can be renewable, but trees grown in native forests are not. Overall, Schnieiders' rant is simply at odds with the reality that in many European countries forestry waste is an integral component of renewable bioenergy production that is aimed at reducing their carbon emissions by up to 20 to 30% in some cases.

While it could be argued that opinion articles are less of a reflection of media bias than articles written by journalists, but Media Watch nevertheless pilloried Dr Marohasy in their recent episode for expressing a considered opinion backed by her research that the proposed Murray-Darling Basin Plan was based on 'junk science'. Surely on the scale of inappropriate public utterances, this pales into insignificance compared to deliberate lies and exaggerations peddled by career activists such as Schneiders based on nothing more than emotion and a need to maintain relevance to keep the donations rolling in.

That The Age could publish such obvious rubbish is an appalling reflection of their editorial standards, but is sadly unsurprising given its highly unbalanced treatment of forestry issues over a long period. This was exemplified by its coverage of a recent legal case bought by a group of environmental activists against the state government's commercial forestry agency, VicForests, over timber harvesting at Toolangi north of Melbourne.

On the Saturday before the case started in early February, The Age published a 2,500-word article – "Industry pushes against the grain" – promoting the notion of VicForests as a hated and incompetent agency overseeing an industry that is virtually dead in the water. When the court case was subsequently won by VicForests, The Age devoted barely 250-words to reporting a result which clearly went against their agenda.

Biased media coverage of natural resource use issues should be fertile ground for the ABC's Media Watch, but despite efforts to draw their attention to they have displayed little or no inclination to cover it in the past. Then again, as some of the worst examples of biased coverage of environmental issues have emanated from the ABC, this is perhaps not so surprising.

Most notably, the double-episode of the ABC's Australian Story – 'Something in the Water' in February 2010 – springs to mind. It claimed that eucalypt plantations occupying just 4% of a Tasmanian town's water catchment were toxic to humans, animals, and marine life. Screened just 3-weeks before the Tasmanian state election, the program sparked a controversy that was not backed by credible science yet resulted in the unseating of the government's Health Minister and quite likely contributed to the formation of the current Labor-Greens minority government which has a distinctly anti-forestry agenda.

If the ABC is to ever rid itself of the perception that it caters to a primarily Green-Left audience, its supposedly independent investigative journalists need to start examining the excesses of mainstream environmentalism and the damage it is doing both to the wider environment and regional and rural communities. A good start would be for Media Watch to investigate arguably the most prominent form of media spin which is seen on an almost daily basis – that is the coverage of natural resource usage promulgated at the behest of mainstream environmental groups.