Conned by protesters, media, we need to know real facts
Letter to the Editor, Courier-Islander, Friday, April 09, 2010
Re: Letter from Eric Becherer, published Friday March 26.
When I moved to B.C. one of the first hot items I became aware of was the dispute over salmon farming.
I listened to CBC Radio, expecting to get "all the facts - the whole story".
The first reference I heard came in a CBC interview that featured Alexandra Morton, who claimed that salmon farms were causing "red" tides that had the potential to kill everything in the path of this drifting phenomenon.
I had heard of red tides off the coast of Florida that killed hundreds of thousands of fish. And with very little investigation, I learned that there are no salmon farms off the coast of Florida. After further investigation into the charges and counter charges in the salmon farming fight, I came across a "news" item on the web site of an environmental group. Ms. Morton had written it. It was titled; "Whales Don't Eat Farmed Salmon--Why Should We?" Real whale experts told me the favorite food of Orcas, the whale species that DOES eat salmon. They prefer chinook. They are bigger, thus providing more sustenance. When those whales are hungry they will eat any salmon they can catch. Orcas also live in the Atlantic; there is only one kind of salmon there.
After more than a decade of off-and-on monitoring the CBC (all services) and the Globe and Mail and many other media outlets, I came to the conclusion that the basic tenets of good journalism - i.e. a news item, based on ALL available facts from a variety of sources, expertly edited and printed and broadcast without bias - were largely ignored by all mainstream media in Canada and specifically in the province of British Columbia.
Broadcast reporters and smaller newspapers work without "fact checkers" those people whose job it is to ensure that those rules have been applied. These days, very few reporters have any scientific background. There is no double checking. The result is a lackadaisical approach and it is sometime based on a built-in personal or corporate bias. At times it is a case of out-right laziness. Basing news items on press releases, hand-outs and quotes from the always-available protesting "experts" is much easier. As for getting "the other side of the story"; if such comments are used at all, they are brushed off and pushed into the last paragraph.
Most of those hand-outs and statements are vital to the staffs of those non-profit organizations. They would not have jobs, if not for the funds they collect on the promise to get salmon farms banned from the B.C. coast. The media are equally important because with enough doom and gloom and threats of extermination etc. they will spread the story. Example: some reporters I have dealt with should be very embarrassed.
They swallowed all the sea lice stories generated over the years. Their headlines screamed 'The pink salmon runs were doomed!' However, remember what happened in the summer of last year? The run of spawning pink salmon along the coast of B.C. was the biggest in years, and the years before there were salmon farms. Now Ms. Morton has a new target; the missing sockeye in the Fraser River and this time, it's not lice by bacterial and viral infections.
There are accurate, scientific data available from the B.C. Government that disproves her latest hypothesis. But the media never checked so the CBC audience that heard Ms. Morton now know, because she told them, that was the main cause of the disappearing sockeye.
The best method of collecting cash from the gullible is to baffle them with junk science, play the role of "saving the oceans and our salmon" and, the big gun, using farmed salmon for ammunition.
Nothing scares people more than telling them that last night's farmed salmon dinner probably will make them sick...telling them their iconic wild salmon are being wiped out, forever... telling them that salmon farms contribute to starving bears and dying trees lining B.C. streams and rivers.
The audiences of the main stream media, are for the most part intelligent. However they are not all that clever.
They resent and reject scientific facts that run contrary to their beliefs and their assumptions.
And they are not clever enough to question the media stories. In a word, they have been conned by the protestors and compliant news services.
What does that make them?
Stuart Morrison
