It must be more than co-incidence that this is the second year running where the Press Association has actively set out to present climate camp protestors in a bad light by running outright lies. Last year they sent out a release claiming that all the protestors at an action against the Israeli fresh produce importer, Carmel Agrexco, were drunk. The Sunday Times picked up the lie and ran with it. The charge was refuted by the activists, and no-one was ever charged for the action.

This year the PA has gone one step further, taking a claim by the police that a "stash of knives and makeshift weapons" allegedly found "near (the) Climate Camp protest site", was actually found 'at the site'. Whilst it isn't difficult to see why the police would want to link Climate Camp to a cache of 'arms' 'found' in a woods somewhere on the Hoo peninsular, it is far more difficult to understand why the Press Association would feel a need to embellish an already incredulous story.

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News notes the role of the PA in the emergence of churnalism, where fewer and fewer journalists are required to produce more and more output, thus becoming heavily reliant on agencies such as Reuters and the PA for copy that they repackage in the style of their own papers. It is incidents such as this which make it look as he is has missed the point - the PA isa not a benign provider of impartial news, but has its own hidden agendas too.

Of course, none of this smearing is new. Last year the big one was the Evening Standard's front page story "Militants in plot to paralyse Heathrow", which resulted in a stinging rebuke for the paper, from the PCC in March 2008. Its a tired old formula, used time and time again by the police to justify their expensive and useless policing, and time after time some 'august organ' from the mainstream media plays the willing flag bearer

Whether the public is as gullible as the police and mainstream journalists like to think is quite a different question. Meridian tonight reported that because of the 'weapons found'. massive convoys of police were making their way to the site from London and even Wales, to be part of an operation estimated to cost £7.5m. Strangely enough thats what last years operation cost, and chances are that this year will be another expensive waste of time, with low level charges, most of which don't lead to convictions, and a whole pile of confiscated crayons, wetsuits, tools and plumbing pipes. Perhaps the public will pay attention for long enough to realise that the claims never come to anything. In any event, the 1400 officers were announced well before the 'lucky find'.