Was Greenpeace an environmental David fighting a corporate Goliath when it fought Shell's decision to dump its Brent Spar oil storage rig in the Atlantic - or did it pack an AK-47 instead of a slingshot?

One thing emerged with startling clarity - Greenpeace manipulated some of the best minds in British journalism during the Brent Spar furore. When 14 Greenpeace protesters were expelled from the oil storage rig, nine reporters were ejected with them, an astonishing ratio as well as revealing an unprecedented collusion of activists and journalists. The resulting TV footage was more redolent of a James Bond movie than coverage of an environmental issue worthy of serious scientific debate.

Some of Britain's top TV executives now think they were 'had' by Greenpeace and they blame themselves, not the activists. Executives at the 1995 National Television Festival in Edinburgh said that broadcasters were 'bounced' into giving Greenpeace favourable coverage in its successful campaign to prevent the Brent Spar being dumped in the ocean.

Greenpeace's media offensive - including the provision of dramatic film footage of its invasion and occupation of the Brent Spar - resulted in one-dimensional coverage by BBC TV and its commercial counterparts, delegates were told. Richard Sambrook, the editor of BBC newsgathering, said "I think in some sense over Brent Spar we were 'had'.......we need to wake up. There was never enough distance between ourselves and the participants. Greenpeace had spent approximately £350,000 ($700,000 CDN) on TV equipment and feeds, far more than the BBC could have afforded."

Greenpeace runs a 24-hour news operation equipped with its own film crews, editing suites and satellite technology, the festival was told. David Lloyd, Channel 4's senior commissioning editor of news and current affairs, said: "On Brent Spar we were 'bounced'. News organizations took great pains to present Shell's side of the argument, but by the time the broadcasters tried to intervene with scientific analyses, the story had, by then, been spun, far, far into Greenpeace's direction."

He related how the pictures provided by Greenpeace showed plucky activists in helicopters flying into a fusillade of water cannons and noted the difficulties of "writing analytical science" into such a scenario.

The Edinburgh meeting took place as a Greenpeace flotilla was en route to the Mururoa atoll in a bid to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. But the French navy, unlike Shell, were oblivious to the media coverage. Activists were arrested, vessels seized and the nuclear weapons tests continued.

While Greenpeace lost the initial bout with the French Navy, the international furore almost certainly made it the ultimate winner in public opinion polls. Some confrontations with armed sailors were reported live by BBC TV journalists aboard Greenpeace vessels. They drew world-wide sympathy for the protesters along with intense hostility to French President Jacques Chirac.

But the sober second thoughts and self doubts expressed by British television experts over the Brent Spar incident are long overdue. Their concern may herald new media trends where scientific veracity takes precedence over colourful stunts and eye catching demonstrations. Many staged events contribute little to public understanding of complex issues yet are irresistible to the media.

Yet would any doctor diagnose the state of a patient's health because of a perceived ability to rappel down high buildings? The very question is absurd yet many political decisions have been based on such idiotic reasoning. It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions have been wasted in the fruitless pursuit of ideological solutions to ecological problems. Just two examples can show how millions were squandered.

For example, the Ontario Waste Management Corporation cost $140 million in 14 years without treating a cupful of liquid wastes. OWMC survived conservative, liberal and NDP governments before it was chopped by the Mike Harris government. But the conservatives, in effect, merely carried out a death sentence pronounced earlier by the NDP cabinet when it rejected OWMC's incineration proposals early in 1995.

Then there was the Interim Waste Authority, created by the NDP to seek garbage disposal sites. IWA cost taxpayers some $80 million without a single bag of garbage being interred. It too was promptly disposed of by the conservatives.

While environmental assessments should consider all possibilities, incineration was not an option during the NDP's environment ministry. Rigid anti-incineration mindsets by activists have contributed to many expensive fiascos.

Our environment is too important, our economy too fragile, for complex environmental issues to be decided on antics better suited to the circus than the political arena. It is one thing to be entertained by the frolics of circus clowns; it is altogether another thing to take their advice seriously.