I am pleased to see that Brent Stafford, shill for the Postmedia Group and Resource Works and their unqualified support for Woodfibre LNG, has chosen to respond in the social media to articles of mine written in this publication.

Stafford defends the notion that you can interview with one interviewer then have that interview voiced over by different interviewer and published as if the result was fair, ethical and accurate. He could not have made my point better than by producing the interview by a male and then showing it re-done by the very attractive Meena Mann, whom the subject, Dr. Michael Hightower – a globally-recognized expert on LNG tanker safety – had never heard of.

It must be noted that the viewer is not told about this switch and has every reason to believe that the interview was done in person throughout by Ms. Mann.

This isn’t doctoring an interview?

Stafford believes that this is good journalism – I am in no position to argue the moral precepts of modern journalism but say that it is a highly deceptive practice and done deliberately. I invite you to listen to both interviews and consider the inflection in the voice from Ms.Mann and her body language, including nodding, smiles and so on.

This is not what Dr. Hightower heard when he was being interviewed and lest you think that is minor, consider how much the inflection in the voice and the body language matters in normal social intercourse. Anyone who has pled cases in the courts knows how many ways you can ask a question and how many ways you can look, gesticulate, and visually work with words as you do, and the difference that can make even though the words are precisely the same.

If this were not so, why wouldn’t Resource Works and Mr. Stafford use the male interviewer, his face, and his gesticulations? Without seeing the guy, I think we can assume that he is not as nice looking as Ms. Mann nor as charming and pleasant to watch. Surely that’s done in order to make the interview itself more convincing and watchable.

It was this practice I condemned by article here and do so again now. It is a shabby deceptive practice intended to deceive and, rather than alleviate that conclusion, Stafford emphasizes and enforces it.

What is interesting are the recommended distances that LNG tankers must maintain from shore according to Dr. Hightower and his Sandia Laboratories. The on-the-water research of Commander Roger Sweeny, RCN, Ret. and the academic work of Dr. Eoin Finn is anathema to Woodfibre LNG and its shady owners.

There’s a reason that Stafford and his clients and partners, Resource Works and Postmedia, avoid this question like it was Ebola. The Sandia recommendations, as you might imagine, are most unhelpful to Woodfibre LNG. In fact, they have spent the time since this was exposed in The Common Sense Canadian, to remain studiously silent on the subject.

Speaking of Dr. Finn – a Howe Sound resident, retired KPMG partner and chemistry PhD – Stafford did a number on him that made me feel ill. It looked like an interview but was anything but. Stafford displayed Dr. Finn making a number of statements elsewhere at different times as if he knew he was in a debate with Captain Stephen Brown, spokesman for the LNG tanker industry. Captain Brown then gave his lengthy industry-biased replies. Needless to say, it would have spoiled everything if Stafford had given Dr. Finn a chance to respond.

In response to a series of tweets Stafford has levelled at me, I have raised this pseudo-interview but in spite my urging that he come clean, he won’t deal with this.

I have repeatedly asked him to explain how a newspaper chain Postmedia (which publishes his video blog) can take an official partnership position on one side of a very public issue when basic journalism ethics require that they remain neutral? How can they pretend to present fair coverage of the LNG and the Woodfibre application issue to the public when they are financially involved supporting them? Stafford refuses to answer.

I’ve asked him about his playacting as a journalist in his gig with the Province and he replies that since he explains what he’s doing its quite OK to fake evenhanded journalism.

I allege no lawbreaking – only misleading make-believe journalism. I can only imagine what Jack Webster, the toughest but always fair journalist, would say if he were alive.

Let me end this part of my response to Stafford by saying that any legitimate enterprise, which is telling the truth about what it intends to do and the consequences, doesn’t need to resort to deceptive practices and glib pseudo journalism to make their case. Furthermore, legitimate enterprises are prepared to meet the questions and criticisms raised and to do so honestly and forthrightly.

My recommendation is that if you want to hear the results of Woodfibre LNG’s propaganda machine, totally unaffected by the truth, that the place to go is Resource Works, the Postmedia Press and Mr. Stafford.

All others – stay tuned.

Yesterday in my email inbox, the chickens began to come home to roost for Postmedia – the Canadian newspaper chain.

My first letter came from a constant correspondent who gave the Official statistics for BC Hydro losses going back to the old NDP years. Since the Campbell/Clark government, the losses have been staggering and BC Hydro is clearly in huge trouble. Those who have read this publication and followed such economic luminaries as Erik Andersen know that most of this goes straight to the catastrophic Campbell energy policy of 2002 which gave the production of new power to the private sector and forced BC Hydro to pay a huge premium for this power. Amongst other things, it was a policy that took hundreds of millions of dollars per year out of the BC treasury, in addition to setting BC Hydro on a path to bankruptcy.

On the eve of Christy Clark’s election in 2011, I had this to say on my website:

[quote]What does this [Energy Policy] mean in real terms?

The bankruptcy of BC Hydro, which will remain only as a conduit by which the private producers (IPPs) funnel their ill-gotten gains to their shareholders abroad.

It means that more and more of our precious rivers will be dammed (IPPs prefer the word “weir” in keeping with the Orwellian “newspeak” that abounds with these guys), with clear cuts for roads and transmission lines.

It means that new pipelines and enlarged old ones will carry the sludge from the Tar Sands to our coast with the mathematical certainty of environmental disasters – without our government making a nickel out of it.

It means that supertankers will proliferate on our coast again with the mathematical certainty of catastrophic spills.

It means continuation of the phoney environmental hearings where the public is denied its right to challenge the need for the project in the first place.

It means that the already truncated BC Utilities Commission, which oversees (or is supposed to) all energy proposals, will be abolished or maintained as a lame duck puppet of the Liberal Government

It means that the private sector will, unhindered, do as it pleases to our environment.

People like me will be jeered as being “against progress, against profit and anti-business”.[/quote]

The Common Sense Canadian, over the years since its inception in 2010, has quoted scientist after scientist, economist after economist, in column after column, to back up our claims. I, along with the estimable Joe Foy of the Wilderness Committee, campaigned against this policy all over the Province in the 2011 Election.

Today we learn that BC Hydro’s debt under the Liberal governments of Campbell/Clark has increased $9.4 Billion!

Yet this monumental story of incompetence, stupidity, political favouritism, ruination of our rivers and fish, fattening the wallets of international business at the expense of the BC taxpayer has been virtually ignored from the start, in all its aspects, by the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province and the National Post – the Postmedia papers. Columnists once famous for holding governments’ feet to the fire have been silent. I wonder why? Perhaps we will see the answer in a moment.      

Postmedia teams up with oil and gas lobbies

The second email I received this morning set forth the deepening and ever-increasing reaction from the public to the revelations that Postmedia are official partners in promoting LNG in Squamish.

Damien and I have been reporting on the public relations shenanigans surrounding the proposed Woodfibre LNG project, chapter and verse, cheat by cheat, lie by lie – including doctored interviews – for many months. These tactics have been directed by Resource Works, the unofficial lobby for Woodfibre. Their efforts have been helped greatly by an official Partnership with the Province – evident in all the op-ed space they receive in Postmedia’s pages. 

One can’t blame people for taking a while to react because this is such an extraordinary event that it completely takes the breath away. Here we have Canada’s largest newspaper company financially involved with a highly controversial industry and pretending at the same time to report on it impartially.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find in either of the two Vancouver papers or indeed the National Post, any critical analysis on LNG whether it be its extraction as natural gas, its impact on the atmosphere, the “fracking” process, its conversion to LNG, its transport abroad, or any other aspect.

It goes further than this because Postmedia has developed a multimillion-dollar partnership with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). This is evident in the National Post, Postmedia’s flagship, which has virtually endorsed, root and branch, the positions of the industry on all matters of oil production and distribution.

All of this has been reported here in The Common Sense Canadian in clear, unadorned English on several occasions without response.

Media and democracy

Now let’s talk in real terms.

You, the reader, a free citizen, are quite entitled to whatever opinions you may wish on the whole aspect of fossil fuels. You may be dedicated to the proposition “the more the merrier” and that’s what a free country is all about. I think you’re a damned fool but that, too, is what a free country is all about.

At the same time, you, I and everybody else, are entitled to all possible information about this and other issues so that we can make up our minds based upon knowledge not simple prejudice.

This you have been denied and it is going to get worse.

Let’s look at a practical example from the last couple of weeks in the Vancouver Sun and Province. They’ve been full of “feel good” stories about LNG communities popping up around the province with all kinds of good things for all.

These stories are not accidents. They are plain and simple plants by the industry through their journalistic partner in order to affect, positively, your view of the LNG industry.

We have, most of us at any rate, grown up with the suspicion that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. Nevertheless, most of us feel we’ve learned to read between the lines and to sort out the pepper from the fly shit. This, I hate to say, is no longer possible because they’re now the same thing.

No longer can you read a single solitary item about fossil fuels in general or, in our bailiwick, LNG specifically, in the Postmedia press and believe a single word. Everything published by the Vancouver Province, the Vancouver Sun, or the National Post concerning LNG is done as a paid partner in the project. That can never ever be forgotten by any who wish to be informed, objective observers of the LNG scene.

It truly sickens me to have to make these observations. I have known, respected, liked, gone to UBC with, spilled beer with – you name it – print journalists going back some 65 years. I grew up on newspapers and, even given the crap provided today, still subscribe. It’s very difficult for me to think of Postmedia going under with all of the jobs that entails.

The fact remains that Postmedia doesn’t deserve to exist in any world of journalism where there is a soupçon of journalistic ethics remaining.