Trees are news in British Columbia, where one out of five jobs is tied to the forest industry, and where hundreds of environmentalists have been arrested in recent years for blockading logging roads. But insightful, uncompromising environmental reporting may be a disappearing species in The Vancouver Sun, B.C.'s biggest newspaper.

Environmentalists and some journalists trace the Sun's problems to late 1990, when a consortium of B.C. logging companies hired the New York-based p.r. firm Burson-Marsteller to buff the industry's image and expunge the "Brazil of the North" label that critics had applied to Canada. Burson-Marsteller, a worldwide specialist in corporate image makeovers, quickly set up a "Forest Alliance" with a start-up budget of $ 1 million from the companies.

With the goal of "build[ing] public confidence in the industry's actions," the Forest Alliance began issuing press releases, producing half-hour television infomercials, and demanding better treatment from news outlets. The effort seems to have worked. Before the alliance got started, 73 percent of British Columbians singled out the forest industry as deserving closer governmental scrutiny, according to a 1990 poll by a major Canadian polling company. By May of this year. that figure had dropped to 40 percent. The alliance itself claims that between 80 and 90 percent of the media coverage arising from its press releases and staged media events has been "positive."

But nowhere did the alliance have a more profound effect than at The Vancouver Sun -- the biggest newspaper in the province, with a daily circulation of 260,000. Delegations of forest company officials and alliance members became a common sight in the Sun's editorial offices. Senior reporter Mark Hume says he was called into his editor's office and grilled for more than an hour by a logging company official and an industry consultant about columns he had written examining the origins of a pro-logging coalition. Sun managing editor Scott Honeyman, Hume says, stood by in silence.

Prior to the birth of the Forest Alliance, the Sun had five full-time reporters covering forestry, fisheries, native affairs, energy and mines, and the environment. Today only the environment beat remains. The rest were lumped into a category called "resources" and handed over to the business section.

Reporters who wrote critically about the forest industry's impact on the environment, fisheries, or tribal land claims -- and those who probed the workings of the Forest Alliance and Burson-Marsteller itself -- say they were subjected to pressure. The Sun's forestry reporter, Ben Parfitt, quit after Honeyman pulled him off his beat because, on a free-lance basis, he had written about Burson-Marsteller and the Forest Alliance for a Vancouver weekly. "He was declaring himself not a dispassionate reporter" with the article, Honeyman says. The paper's former native affairs reporter. Terry Glavin. who says the newsroom became "a bloody war zone" for reporters who wrote critically about the logging industry, also quit this year.

Meanwhile, in 1991, two months after the forming of the Forest Alliance, when the Sun's business side decided it needed its own outside p.r. firm to promote its shift to morning publication, it turned to a company the paper was familiar with -- Burson-Marsteller. That job was finished by the end of the year.

This May more than 700 people turned out for a Vancouver conference titled "Take Back the News: Media, the Environment, and the Public's Right to Know," presented by Simon Fraser University. At the conference, Honeyman defended the Sun's performance, blamed the recession for the loss of the environment-related beats, and denied that the Sun's hiring of Burson-Marsteller had had any impact on editorial decisions.

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