Photo: supplied
Former BBC rural journalist Anna Jones used a Nuffield scholarship to look at how the urban/rural disconnect influences the mainstream media's reporting of farming stories.
She says an urban bias in terms of how farming stories were covered was "endemic"; they tended to see all large scale or intensive farming as bad, had little appreciation of how farming life really is, and general knowledge of key farming issues wasn't seen as important compared with education/politics/health rounds.
However, the farming community was also to blame for the rural/urban divide. Farmers tended to think they were "owed" good press, they were unnecessarily defensive when questioned and not always transparent with their farm operations.
