Eco-Propaganda

The EcoNews is certainly under no obligation to offer 'fair and balanced' reporting, but the Northcoast Environmental Center's supporters may not realize exactly how far they are from that noble goal, as they are fed polarizing propaganda issue after issue. But this latest one is over the top.

The March 2007 issue's cover story on Palco starts out telling the reader "The story of Pacific Lumber Company - now calling itself Palco - has been told and retold in painful detail for 22 years, ever since marauding Texas investor Charles Hurwitz leveraged enough publicly traded stock in the company to force out a long era of more benign management."

The author, Erica Terence, then quotes Mark Lovelace laying the groundwork for Ken Miller's "Transition Mission." She of course, has no idea how she is being used.

The crocodile tears pour forth. "The last 22 years have not been good to Humboldt County. We've been rocked by protests, tree-sits, ceaseless litigation, layoffs, mill closures, the Judi Bari bombing, the Stafford landslide, the pepperspray incident, the death of David Chain, increased flooding, landsliding and environmental damage, and a deepening polarization of our community..." Lovelace says.

You'd think he was getting ready to apologize. But no.

And Erica goes right along, regurgitating all the talking points from Lovelace, Ken Miller, and Ken Miller's other partner Jesse Noel.

Now, she says, "Lovelace and his colleagues do not want to waste time fixing blame - they'd rather figure out how to fix the structure of the company." As if they owned it.

She probably has no idea of the ceaseless role of those three in creating all the "protests, tree-sits, ceaseless litigation, layoffs, mill closures, the Judi Bari bombing, the pepperspray incident, the death of David Chain, and the deepening polarization of our community."

But there's no attempt at balance here, and no real research. No attempt to include a different perspective. This is propaganda, pure and simple, and it ought to be identified as such.

The EcoNews is a newsLETTER, not a newsPAPER, but publications are a record of our time. When they do not offer a full and honest accounting, with facts checked and with both sides represented they do a disservice to current and future readers and researchers.

"Earth First!," "Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters," "Salmon Forever," "EPIC," "Humboldt Watershed Council," "The Alliance for oh-so-ethical-Business," "Timber Yes, Fraud No" - Ken Miller and his crew, using many different "group" names, have been involved in a decades-long effort to attack one man and destroy one company. Pure and simple. And that story ought to be told.