Reporting From Small Communities: Energy Battles in Shetland

Do reporters always know what’s best for the environment and should their bias influence coverage? Even the roll-out of clean energy has its opponents. Here’s one case study on how local reporters met the contested evolution of wind energy in oil-rich Shetland.

By Claire Davenport

To onlookers, it could seem counterfactual that an economy heavily reliant on oil should oppose the erection of new wind farms on its shores. But that is what happened in Shetland.

Since 2009 Viking Energy, a partnership between a utility and a charitable trust, has been trying to erect large new onshore wind turbines that would eventually hook up to a subsea cable to the mainland, feeding the national grid.

“Shetland almost has a love affair with oil and suddenly renewable energy is on the scene but is met with a lot of opposition and skepticism,” said Hans Marter, managing editor of local news provider www.shetnews.co.uk who has been reporting local news in Shetland since 1996.

Shetland is home to one of Europe’s largest oil terminals, Sullom Voe, which is widely credited with transforming the island and funding social and infrastructural development. As a result Shetland now also has well over half a billion pounds of reserves in various funds.

While the environmental case against oil today is clear-cut, decades ago these arguments were not a generally-accepted science.

According to calculations made by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2011, oil is up to forty times more carbon-intensive than wind. There is also a sound business case to be made for wind; large onshore wind is cheaper and the taller the towers, the more hours of electricity that can be produced. But should journalists choose a side in the energy debate when their job is to uphold the primacy of balance or represent their public no matter the cost?

“The assumption that good journalism requires mutually opposed views to be treated as equally valid simply doesn’t hold when the overwhelming weight of evidence points resolutely in one direction.”

Physicist and cancer researcher David Robert Grimes argues that journalists should exercise more judgement when the scientific evidence is stacked against a specific point of view. He cites the prominent argument over whether to cite climate change deniers when 99% of the scientific community backs anthropogenic climate change. In another example, reputable news outlets have famously removed the word ‘dirty’ in front of ‘oil’, after caving to pressure from interfering oil flaks.

“The assumption that good journalism requires mutually opposed views to be treated as equally valid simply doesn’t hold when the overwhelming weight of evidence points resolutely in one direction,” Grimes wrote in a Guardian editorial in 2016.

But as energy stories play out in real time and affect tangible communities, news reporting does not necessarily assist in making clear distinctions, as reporters in Shetland learned.

For example, what do you do when your lobby are well-intentioned residents who will be directly disrupted by the overwhelming sight and sound of 150 enormous new turbines on their doorsteps, endangering their way of life and wildlife?

While Welsh-born reporter Charley-Kai John from the weekly print newspaper, The Shetland Times, agreed that reporters should not report all things equally, he added that local community reporting is by its nature more layered than the meta-analysis that plays out in national media.

“I think the most important thing for me as a journalist, aside from raising community concerns, was to represent those nuances in the story,” he said.

In Shetland, those nuances were tense emotional conflicts about land use, wildlife and to a larger extent an indigenous people defending its land from external interests.

In 2009 when planning applications were being made by Viking, residential groups, made up of crofters and other concerned parties, signed petitions to halt what they deemed a devastation to the surrounding landscape. At the time cohorts of that opposition were cited saying they were not convinced a large 600MW wind farm built on deep peat in an island community disconnected from the national grid would help combat climate change.

“I think the most important thing for me as a journalist, aside from raising community concerns, was to represent those nuances in the story.”

This gave rise to a grass-roots group confusingly called Sustainable Shetland. The group’s website says it has 826 members who oppose the wind farm on grounds that “the granting of consent in the face of strong environmental arguments sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of Scotland.”

Viking had proposed to build Europe’s largest onshore wind energy farm in peatland areas that residents argued were badly needed as carbon sinks and were also home to precious bird life. In 2015 a case to halt planning on the grounds that it endangered the habitat of whimbrel, a rare wading bird, was overturned by the UK’s High Court.

Local journalists have attempted to honour both sides of the Viking debacle but say balance has not been easy to come by.

The developers for Viking and their flaks did not help their case at first by providing dubitable figures for their projected carbon neutrality and their overall economic impact on Shetland. Pressed for clarity, they only seemed to flounder. And when community concerns grew louder, Viking grew silent.

“Viking did not return your calls or put anyone up for comment. We would get short, bland statements emailed to us but got no opportunity to put questions directly to the company,” said Mike Grundon who worked for BBC Shetland for over 22 years.

Grundon said it was his job as a local BBC reporter to cover local concerns than pursue any self-interest and added that he preferred to keep an open mind on the development of Shetland’s energy landscape.

Marter, however, who openly supports sustainable energy like wind, also struggled to get comment from Viking. He said he found it easy to get information or comment from local opponents to Viking, while the company itself fell deathly silent.

“The company claimed to develop a community-owned wind farm project, but when the community asked reasonable questions about it, they were ignored,” he said.

One doesn’t have to look far for media willing to criticise oil, but that coverage is scant in smaller news media for several reasons. When the oil boom arrived in Shetland in the late seventies, there was little if no opposition to its environmental impact nor was it yet fully understood.

“Oil has always been far more difficult to confront,” Marter added. “Not to mention their people are not local while initially Viking was a local project, and those behind the project were all well known locally.”

He believes that oil is still perceived as ‘a force for good’ in Shetland, helped by the fact the terminal has never been involved in any major environmental disaster since a slip in its early days in 1978 when the tanker Esso Bernicia spilled 1,100 tonnes of bunker oil in Sullom Voe harbour.

And while there are accessible local interests lobbying against the Viking wind farm, the same cannot be said for oil in the North Sea. Even large outfits will struggle to get their point across to Shetland.

Greenpeace has abandoned planned protests against the decommissioning of oil rigs, which leaves tonnes of oil sludge in the middle of the sea, after Shell won a court order preventing the activists from boarding oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.

Oil is also at the heart of vast social and economic change in Shetland from the presence of leisure centres in its outer corners to the funding of vital infrastructure and Arts organisations. The same cannot yet be said for wind. In spite of local opposition and the failure to win a government subsidy thus far, Viking still claims it is ‘shovel-ready.’

This battle of wills will likely continue to play out in the local news media for several more years, and perhaps wind projects will inadvertently receive some grace as oil buckles under the Covid-19 lockdown.

Covering news in times of crisis: the role of fact-checking

by Caterina Dassie

Journalists have always had to verify information, whether it is a picture, a source or data from an organization. Fact-checking is one of the pillars of journalism. Some circumstances, however, require journalists to be even more cautious, especially if ideas for stories come from the web, as working remotely from home and lockdowns become the daily routine.

The Reuters Institute, in collaboration with the University of Oxford published a report which analyses more than 200 pieces of false-evaluated or ambiguous information by fact-checkers circulating in English between January and March 2020. Some of the research highlights were the importance of fact-checking providers and how prominent public figures play a big role in spreading misinformation about the pandemic. 

Misinformation can be dangerous in times of crisis. This is where the role of journalism becomes crucial and journalists have to find better ways to fact-check what is on their hands to better fulfill the watchdog role for society and keep communities informed. 

Daniel Nolan, a Budapest-based journalist and European Press Prize laureate says that “speed is important, but in the time of Coronavirus accuracy is priority, so reporters should use multiple sources.”

Daniel Levitt, interactive journalist at The Guardian, agrees and adds: “If you’re not sure whether something is true, see if multiple credible websites have covered the same piece of news.”

“Speed is important, but in the time of Coronavirus accuracy is priority.”

While hoaxes have always existed, there has been a rise in numbers in recent months regarding the spread of Covid-19. Earlier in February the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the increasing amount of information available could have made it harder for people to actually understand the guidance on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since the outbreak of the virus, social media platforms have been trying to better regulate the spread of false information.

Recently, platforms such as Twitter, Google and Facebook published a statement reporting how they will be working together to fight “fraud and misinformation about the virus”. At the beginning of the month, Google announced its support towards non-profit organizations like Full Fact, CORRECTIV and First Draft, which verify and check information.

Google News Initiative will make $6.5 million available to fund collaborative verification projects while supporting journalists with free tools and trainings to maintain the accuracy of their journalistic work. Google has also dedicated a Covid-19 trends dashboard allowing reporters to detect growing narratives around the topic or see which are the main questions readers have. Google Chrome also has an extension, Newsguard, which verifies credible news outlets. 

Meanwhile CrowdTangle, a Facebook analytics tool, has developed live displays on content published on social media which emphasizes information from credible sources like WHO and media outlets as well as providing an advanced search option to track information.

“Whatever you do, do not get your news from Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.” Levitt advises journalists. “They’re all terrible for stopping the spread of fake information.” 

The common suggestion from journalists seems to be the old instinct of being skeptical.

“Journalists shouldn’t abandon news judgment and common sense,” says Alan Wheatley, former global economics correspondent for Reuters. “It’s better to be right and second with a story than wrong and first.”

Other types of initiatives have attempted to keep journalists correctly informed. The euvsdisinfo.eu, which focuses on Russian misinformation, has a weekly newsletter. In Hungary the Budapest-based think-tank Political Capital analyses fake news trends and flags up the fake stories and tropes being widely shared online.

Governments are also involved in trying to reduce the spread of misinformation. In Hungary, thanks to the recent amendment to its Civil Code by the Orbán government, spreading fake information is now a criminal offense punishable by one to five years in prison.

“We seem to be entering new territory,” says Nolan. “The amendment has already had an effect.”

So how can journalists come out of a pandemic, or ‘infodemic,’ as winners?

“Lockdown is a great opportunity for working journalists to learn to verify sources remotely and get to know the resources out there,” says Nolan. 

As reporters work together to overcome the challenges of a pandemic, more resources become available online.

Online courses such as the one provided by First Draft (‘Covering coronavirus: An online course for journalists’) help media outlets cope with the issue and suggest tools to journalists in order to detect misinformation and verify and monitor content online. Additionally, the training provides support to journalists by protecting their well-being while covering a crisis.  

AFP, a global news agency, has launched Busting Coronavirus Myths to fight false information. Meanwhile, the International Fact-Checking Network, made up of the collaboration between more than 100 fact-checkers from 39 countries, have made more than 3,000 fact-checks as of now. 

Despite the ‘infodemic,’ there are many tools available for journalists to verify information, and while media outlets are working under enormous pressure during this time of crisis, the current circumstances may have a positive repercussion for journalism once life goes back to normal. 

“I’m hoping the new working conditions for many journalists will be an excuse for a ‘market correction’ in the way we report and find story ideas,” says Levitt.