60 Minutes and BC Salmon Farming

There is a decade old saying in television: that when 60 Minutes shows up at your door, it can’t be good.

And you can be that that’s what anti-salmon farming activist Alexandra Morton was banking on when she pitched 60 Minutes the story about salmon farming. She’ll be thoroughly disappointed. They actually reported on the facts.

There are three segments posted by 60 Minutes.

The main episode (“Saving the wild salmon”) looks at the impacts of salmon farming. To sum up the 13 minute episode: the benefits of aquaculture far outweigh the impacts. While it is unfortunate that the show attempts to create some element of doubt by choosing to ignore thousands of sampled fish in Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia that clearly concluded no (that is “zero”) evidence of any foreign fish virus in the Pacific Northwest. The BC Salmon Farmers Association even provided this evidence to the show’s producer six months ago, but unfortunately he chose to ignore it.

Another segment (“Wild-caught or farmed? The diner’s dilemma”) concludes that all salmon (farmed, wild, wild-caught, ranched) are all very healthy for us. Great. End of story.

The final segment (“Salmon farms of the future?”) concludes that ocean and land farms can (and will) provide fish for the future. However, the images of the land-based farm profiled won’t have customers lined up at the seafood counter waiting to sample it’s product…

CBS’ famous 60 Minutes program recently aired several segments about salmon farming, and they were actually pretty fair.

The show was a generally fair representation of salmon farming in BC. I especially liked how the segment showing the seafloor beneath a fallowed salmon farm showed the seafloor was crawling with prawns.

My only two concerns were:

1. Letting Alexandra Morton get away with a bald-faced lie when she talks about the ISA virus and says, “There’s nobody actually looking at the wild fish carefully.”

This is COMPLETELY false and it’s a shame 60 Minutes did not challenge her on this lie.

There were thousands of wild fish tested in Alaska, BC and Washington specifically for this virus in the past four years.

ISA surveillance fact sheet

Washington ISA test results

BC test results

Maybe she doesn’t think that thousands of properly-conducted scientific tests are “careful” compared to her method of sampling sick and dying spawned-out fish off riverbanks.

The problem with this is that as soon as Pacific salmon return to freshwater to spawn, they start to die. Their bodies rot around them. Their goal is to live long enough to reproduce.

Spawning fish will be infected with all sorts of things, many of which have similar symptoms. Their ravaged bodies will also be a very poor source of tissue for testing purposes.

As well, Morton’s statements about virus and “genetic markers” show her willful ignorance as she chooses to ignore how virus testing actually works, in favour of telling the story she wants to tell.

2. Ending with a useless interview with a lawyer who refuses to say whether or not ISA is in BC.

I mean come on. A lawyer isn’t going to say anything definitive about a scientific question. This question should have been posed to a scientist, or several scientists, who could have provided a more responsible answer.

And they have — except 60 Minutes chose not to use it.