If, say, a lobby group for forestry interests did this there would be the most enormous outcry:
The event was a hoax, and so was the follow-up email and the website with its often hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true fake...marketing copy.
Yet environmental campaign group Greenpeace are revelling in their media manipulation, lies and misrepresentation. Indeed as the New Statesman (hardly the most anti-green bunch) have put it:
The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public - not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.
There is a limit to the bounds of campaigning. For me, Greenpeace crossed it years ago when they forced Shell to adopt a less environmentally sensible disposal of a redundant oil rig for the sake of cheap headlines and the 'kerching' of the organisations cash register. But this really is stepping even further beyond those bounds:
“Even if you think Shell is evil and will lie to achieve their goals, now you know Greenpeace is the exact same way.”
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