Country Smallholding

Frack­ing ar­ti­cle ‘one-sided’

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I’ve been a reg­u­lar reader of County

Smallholdi­ng for a long time and find it very in­for­ma­tive.

Your busi­ness col­umn InFo­cus in the De­cem­ber is­sue ran an ar­ti­cle say­ing ‘No to frack­ing’, fol­lowed by Green­peace’s version of frack­ing and its con­se­quences, fol­lowed by an in­vi­ta­tion to do­nate to Friends of the Earth.

I found this –what I now understand was a paid for ad­ver­tise­ment – to be com­pletely out of or­der for the ed­i­to­rial staff to ac­cept. This can only be de­scribed as a one-sided po­lit­i­cal version of frack­ing, and that you ac­cepted it for pub­li­ca­tion amazes me.

No doubt many of your read­ers agree with frack­ing and many do not, but for

County Smallholdi­ng to carry such a dis­taste­ful in­tru­sion within its cov­ers, purely for the fi­nan­cial gain of the ad­ver­tise­ment, is truly an in­sult to its read­ers.

I am sure Cuadrilla would wel­come the op­por­tu­nity to place an ad­ver­tise­ment with you to give their version of frack­ing.

Please keep pol­i­tics and re­li­gion out of County Smallholdi­ng.

Re­gards, Tom But­ler (by email) I was ex­tremely dis­ap­pointed to see the ar­ti­cle by Friends of the Earth in the InFo­cus sec­tion of the De­cem­ber is­sue of Coun­try Smallholdi­ng. Such public­ity for the ex­tremely one-sided views of a protest group should have no place in the mag­a­zine and par­tic­u­larly not in a sec­tion that ap­pears to have the en­dorse­ment of the ed­i­to­rial team. A prop­erly re­searched and bal­anced ar­ti­cle re­gard­ing frack­ing and the pos­si­ble ef­fects on small­hold­ers may have its place, but I do not pay my sub­scrip­tion to read re­cruit­ment cam­paign ma­te­rial for non-rel­e­vant mi­nor­ity in­ter­ests.

Re­gards, Martin Churly (by email)

ED­I­TOR SAYS:

The Friends of the Earth item was in the In Fo­cus ‘advertoria­l’ sec­tion of Coun­try Smallholdi­ng. Such ma­te­rial is sup­plied by ad­ver­tis­ers as part of a com­mer­cial ar­range­ment. In this case an ‘Ad­ver­tis­ing fea­tures’ strapline was omit­ted from the page. We apol­o­gise for the er­ror. We do re­view the type of ma­te­rial that is car­ried in this sec­tion of the mag­a­zine to en­sure that it is ap­pro­pri­ate.

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