Greenpeace

Greenpeace is an international environmental campaign group.

Anti-nuclear activities

In October 2013 Greenpeace dropped its legal challenge to block a £16bn nuclear plant planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset in the UK. The group had lodged an application for judicial review, arguing that Hinkley should not have been approved without any concrete plans for dealing with radioactive waste. According to The Independent,

Campaigner Emma Gibson said that the Government had since disclosed the bulk of its defence, which she admitted showed there were plans for a waste dump. Greenpeace maintains that it is "highly unlikely" the dump will ever be built.

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.