Greenpeace

Water

Greenpeace, the environmental NGO, sponsored a conference in Toronto, Canada on 22 March 2008. Other sponsors include USAID, UNDP, FNAUP Government of Canada, Glaxosmithkline, TV5 and FIAT PIANIS.

Video News Releases

Using a highly professional communications unit as one of its main propaganda tools, Greenpeace has pioneered the development of video news releases (VNRs) to give to the world's television stations and print media. Since many of its actions are planned and carried out in secrecy, and since many of the locations, such as incinerator chimneys or nuclear submarine bases, are inaccessible to news cameras, Greenpeace now provides its own video or stills footage of its actions, feeding them direct to the media. During the Brent Spar controversy, when media helicopters were hit by water cannon from Shell's tugs, its VNRs were greedily gobbled up by television news programmes unable or unwilling to get their own camera crews to the scene.

But at last year's Edinburgh television festival, this led to accusations that Greenpeace was manipulating the media. Richard Sambrook, the head of BBC television and radio news, said there were dangers that journalists, sent on stories as guests of Greenpeace, could "turn native", and added: "In some senses we were had over Brent Spar. I'm left feeling Greenpeace was pulling us by the nose through too much of the campaign." The same doubts provoked Channel 4 News to issue stricter internal guidelines on its use of VNRs, on the grounds that more and more campaigning bodies and public relations firms were using them. Greenpeace's supporters protest that media bosses are attacking them for using the same techniques that far richer and more powerful industrial and state authorities, such as the police, the armed forces or the oil in-dustry, use regularly but without any similar attacks.