It’s been a fun week dodging harpoons fired by Greenpeace and other opponents of whaling.

Oddly enough, the only political view I’ve offered over this time has
been the suggestion that most Australians hate the idea of hunting the
marine mammals – and view Japan’s “scientific” whaling program with
contempt and horror.

What I’ve been asking is how objective the reporting of
the Antarctic whaling wars has been – and what’s ratio of spin to facts in the messages we’re getting.

That’s enough of a crime, apparently, to turn me into some sort of
obsessive nutter – a journalistic Captain Ahab – in the eyes of some
environmental activists.

Yet it seems to be an important point, if the experiences of Eric
Wilson, a maritime law expert at Monash University who has been caught
up in this debate, are anything to go by. He’s not all that happy with
the way he’s been reported, you’ll discover if you look at comments
from him at the Online Opinion website.

“I made it clear that we were geting unclear, conflicting, and garbled
reports about what was actually happening,” he says. Absolutely.