The New York Times recently asked its online readers a simple question: should the newspaper check the claims made by politicians before it reports them? The response was a torrent of bemused hostility. What, the readers wanted to know, did the newspaper think its job was? Much has been written in recent years about the difficulty that the media seems to have sorting fact from fiction and distinguishing balance from barracking but the mining industry provides a clear example of the difficulties that all our media seem to have dealing with – an industry that spends more on public relations than some industries spend on research and development.